


Distance Learning for fun and profit...

by mp3_1415player



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:27:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 59,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28493853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mp3_1415player/pseuds/mp3_1415player
Summary: Taylor has skillz.Odd things result.This is a story that started as a collection of snippets, which seems to have become large enough to warrant taking further. So here it is...
Comments: 85
Kudos: 266





	1. Distance Learning

Connecting the last wire to the relevant test point with a quick dab from her soldering iron, Taylor lowered the magnifying glass and put the iron back into the stand. She waved a hand in front of her face to blow the wisp of smoke from the flux away, then studied the block of electronics in front of her on her desk. Carefully, slender fingers went over each sub unit, checking the wiring against a stack of hand-written notes next to her. “Master clock,” she mumbled as she worked. “Yeah, that’s connected from here, to here, to… here. Good. Phase error control signal… _also_ connected.” She wiggled a small connector and scowled when it popped loose.  
  
“Stupid mmcx connectors, they never properly...” Pressing delicately she smiled when there was a tiny _click_ under her finger. “Got it. I hate these things, note to self, next one use an SMB connector.” She quickly jotted a few words in her notebook, then leafed through a whole pile of carefully drawn schematics to the right page and altered one section, circling it in red ink and writing in the modification, time, and date next to it.  
  
It was important to document things properly, she felt.  
  
Going back to checking her work, she kept checking the wiring, talking very quietly to herself as she proceeded, until she finally finished, straightening up with a smile. “Great. Everything’s hooked up, and ready to test.” Picking up the multi-cored cable she’d soldered to a dozen points inside the circuitry she looked at the free end, double-checking that all the color-coded wires were connected to the right pins on the complex plug at the end. “And this is right too,” she muttered. “Not making _that_ mistake again...”  
  
The girl plugged the cable into another one that led to a stack of test equipment, much of it salvaged from the TV shop down the road after it shut down due to the owner having met an unfortunate end as collateral damage during one of the all too regular gang fights. The company that had come in to clear out the place had dumped most of the contents into a couple of large dumpsters around the back, which she’d noticed on the way home from school. Seizing the opportunity she’d persuaded her father to take the family truck over and spent a happy two hours scavenging a vast haul of useful odds and ends, along with enough obsolete but functional components to keep her going for years.  
  
Now, she flicked the power switch on the front of the old dual-channel oscilloscope and watched as the indicator light came on along with a faint high pitched whine from the thing. It might have been mostly tube based, but it had been a very expensive device in its day and the specification was still good, it was just about six times the size of a modern one and took twenty minutes to warm up and stabilize. For the price of twenty bucks to the guys clearing out the shop to let her haul away half the stuff they were going to shovel into landfill anyway, it was a bargain.  
  
Luckily her dad had known them, as the union had contacts everywhere. It came in handy at times.  
  
While she was waiting for the scope to become usable, she turned on half a dozen other units, then rummaged around in a drawer for her good multimeter and the really fine probes. Eventually everything was on and ready and she had finished clipping several test connections onto power inputs and signal measuring points.  
  
Finally, having obsessively triple checked there were no shorts between any of the half dozen different voltage lines, she took a deep breath and prodded the master power switch on her test console. It depressed with a small click and the rather anticlimactic result was that four green LEDs lit one after the other.  
  
She smiled widely.  
  
“ _Finally!”_  
  
Picking up the meter she set it to the right range, then carefully measured a dozen different voltages throughout the thing she’d spend a month building. “Yeah, twelve volts is good, six volts is good, minus fifty two volts is… a quarter of a volt high, but whatever, close enough for now, five volts good… Everything’s in specification. So, if I do this...” She flipped two toggle switches and adjusted a small potentiometer with a tiny screwdriver, then looked at the screen of the scope, on which two waveforms wiggled their way along. “...that happens. OK, so far so good.” She leaned closer, pushing her glasses back up her nose, and carefully inspected the display, then clicked the timebase adjustment knob a couple of places. “Not quite right. So I need to...”  
  
Picking up a non-conductive adjusting tool she inserted it into the core of one of the coil slugs on her circuit and very slowly turned it clockwise. The trace shivered and changed. “Good… Good… Whoops, bad, very bad!” A faint hum came from the device in front of her and she could smell something getting hot. Quickly turning the control back a quarter of a turn she relaxed when the hum and the incipient burning smell both faded away. “Close.”  
  
Adjustments were made to a few more coils, a couple of variable capacitors, and two little modules she’d made from scratch from some salvaged silver wire wrapped around a pair of assemblies constructed out of graphite rods from an old battery with a small painstakingly shaped piece of quartz on each end. One of them started glowing a very faint violet with a hissing sound, while made her pause, inspect it closely, then slowly nod. “OK. I _think_ that’s right.”  
  
The girl looked through her notes, glancing between the circuitry on the bench, her instruments, and the papers, before she finally shrugged. “Yeah, it’s fine. I think. Nothing’s on fire, anyway, so...”  
  
She dropped the notebook back onto the bench and reached out for the last switch, the one that turned on the phase modulator, then flicked it to the on position.  
  
A deep hum made the entire room vibrate for a second or two, rose rapidly in pitch to a whine, and faded away. The second rod lit up bright blue for a moment then dimmed down to the same faint violet glow as the first one, both of them alternately fading up and down in antiphase with each other. “Wow. Cool,” she said to herself.  
  
“Taylor? What the hell was that?”  
  
“Sorry, dad, I got a harmonic feedback loop going, but it’s fine now,” she called back.  
  
“Try not to do it again, three mugs just fell out of the cupboard and all the birds on the lawn flew away,” her father shouted, sounding mildly amused and only slightly annoyed.  
  
“My bad!” Taylor grinned to herself, then turned her chair to the side and reached for a pair of headphones, which she slipped over her ears. She plugged the jack on the end of the cable into the front of the heavily modified ham radio that was next to the oscilloscope, her electronic widget not only connected to the antenna socket where the normal coax plug would have gone, this hanging loose next to the bench, but to a number of places inside the chassis. Setting the controls to the right configuration she very gently turned the tuning knob, listening intently.  
  
A rustling sound like someone crumpling paper a very long way away wavered around the threshold of audibility, and as the knob ever so slowly rotated, little bursts of strange sounds came and went. Some of them were reminiscent of animal calls overlaid with what might have been the sound of the sea, a couple were a weirdly atonal almost-music but not quite, one was a distinct crackling that was more like frying bacon than anything else she could think of, and quite a few were past her ability to even put a description to.  
  
She picked one of the louder signals and slowly fine tuned the receiver until it was as strong as she could get it, then fiddled with the sideband controls for a while to see if that would make it better. The strange underwater gobbling noise faded and got louder, phasing in and out in a bizarre manner. Eventually it more or less stabilized and she nodded in satisfaction. Returning her attention to her scope she changed a few settings then studied the results with a small frown.  
  
“What _is_ that?” she asked herself very quietly, watching the trace plot out something strange. It seemed to have a pattern to it but it wasn’t something she could really identify. Writing half a page of notes on it, along with exact settings of everything, she finally put the pen down and returned to the radio, moving on to another signal.  
  
This process repeated over and over for the rest of the wet and windy mid-march day until she finally took the headphones off and leaned back. “Well, it works, but I’m not sure what it actually _does,_ ” she remarked.  
  
“Keeps you mostly quiet, which is useful,” a voice said from behind her rather unexpectedly, making her shriek in shock and whip around. Her father was grinning at her reaction and holding out a plate in one hand with several sandwiches on, and a glass in the other one which was full of milk.  
  
“Holy _crap_ dad!” she shouted. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”  
  
“I hardly snuck up on you, I knocked on your door and you didn’t answer,” he protested, still grinning. “It’s half past six and you’ve been sitting there for more than five hours. I thought you might be hungry.”  
  
“I didn’t hear you,” she said more calmly, somewhat embarrassed.  
  
“I noticed.” He offered her the plate and glass, which she took with a smile of thanks. Leaning over her shoulder he studied the mass of electronics. “Does it work?”  
  
“I think so. It’s doing _something_ , anyway. All the power draws and that sort of thing are right, and the interphase modulation signals are perfect, but I’m not sure if what I’m getting is what I _should_ be getting or just something random.” Taylor took a bite out of the first sandwich, then gestured with it at the device on her desk. “The downconversion must be working or I wouldn’t get a signal at all,” she explained in a muffled voice before swallowing, then continuing more understandably, “and I _am_ getting a signal. I just can’t figure out what it _is_ yet.”  
  
She took another bite and chewed, regarding her latest project with mildly irritated satisfaction.  
  
Her father put his hand on her shoulder. “You’ll figure it out sooner or later, you’re good at that sort of thing."  
  
“Thanks, dad.” The girl smiled up at him.  
  
“Oh, while I remember, Kurt said he found some old radio tubes in one of the sheds we’ve been clearing out,” her father went on, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and looking at it. “Spares for the ship to shore radio transmitter the union used to use, but it’s all been replaced with newer stuff these days. Big things, he said, nearly a foot long. The number is, um… 8166 slash 4 dash 1000A? Does that mean anything to you?”  
  
She thought for a few seconds. The part number sounded familiar. Eventually she nodded. “Yeah, that’s a high power tetrode amplifier tube.”  
  
“Any use to you? We don’t have any need for them. He said there were half a dozen of the things.”  
  
“I can figure out something to do with them,” she laughed. “Thank you. And thank Kurt too.”  
  
He ruffled her hair as he put the paper on the desk. “I will do. One of the guys also gave me three dead microwaves, maybe those will have some useful parts too.”  
  
“Magnetrons are always useful,” she assured him, glancing at the one she’d rebuilt that was squatting in the middle of her project, emitting a dim red glow from the heater filament.  
  
“OK, I’ll bring them home on Monday.” He looked out the window, where it was getting dark. “I was thinking we could go out for chinese tomorrow. For a Sunday treat.”  
  
“I’d like that, Dad,” she said softly.  
  
“Me too.” Smiling at her, he made a mess of her curly hair once more, then left chucking to himself at her squawk of pseudo-rage.  
  
When she’d finished eating the last of the sandwiches and drunk the milk, she put the plate and glass on the floor next to the desk and picked up the headphones, slipping them over her head again. Going back to carefully picking her way through the signals her invention had made available to her, she finally stopped on one of the first ones she’d found, the one that sounded a little like someone frying bacon while arc welding happened in the background. There was something about it that seemed vaguely familiar, unlike most of the others.  
  
Listening to it intently she watched the signal jump about on the screen of the oscilloscope, which she spent the next hour fiddling with, until she froze in surprise, her eyes widening.  
  
“It’s _data_ ,” she breathed, leaning closer. “That’s the pattern, it’s framing pulses with a payload between them. It was driving me _nuts_ trying to work out why that sounded familiar.”  
  
She tweaked the scope controls more confidently now, watching the results, then nodded and looked around for some more test cables. Finding what she needed she quickly hooked half a dozen signal generators together in a rat’s nest of wiring, using one to trigger another, the final complicated signal being combined with one from the innards of her device and connected into the oscilloscope on the trigger channel.  
  
Flipping a switch on the front of the scope she watched the trace instantly stop randomly moving around in a near-meaningless mass of green light and semi-stabilize. “Not quite the right frequency,” she mumbled, adjusting one of the signal generators, then another, the green line slowly moving towards something sensible. “And the pulse length is wrong… closer… that looks about right.” The trace was almost stable now, clear sync pulses separated by quickly changing data that was different from frame to frame. She squinted at it, while making some final adjustments, then sat back and stared at the results.  
  
Eventually she picked up her notebook and recorded all the settings of everything, along with a quickly drawn sketch showing how it all hooked together. When she’d done that she went back to staring at the screen with her elbow on the desk, her chin propped up on her fist.  
  
After nearly twenty minutes of watching, she said quite firmly to herself. “ _That_ is a video signal, with a data subcarrier, and an audio signal buried in it too. I wonder if I can turn it into something I can actually watch?”  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
It took her two months.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Turning on the second generation version of her original invention, Taylor connected the old laptop her father had found in a second hand shop to it and opened the screen. Prodding the power button she waited more or less patiently for it to finish booting, then double clicked the program she’d written after a lot of experimentation and much reading of the books she’d borrowed from the library on signal analysis. While it initialized the data storage array which took much longer than a modern machine would have done, the hard drive clicking away inside the ancient computer, she turned the ham radio on and checked that it was still tuned correctly. A little careful tweaking and everything was ready.  
  
She typed a few numbers into several text input boxes that were waiting for input and hit enter. The screen blanked, went black, then a whole series of colorful lines started slowly moving down it, forming a pattern she studied carefully. Eventually she went back to the first screen and changed two of the numbers, before repeating the process. This time she smiled.  
  
“Got you.”  
  
She tapped the space bar.  
  
The screen flickered and produced a surprisingly good video image.  
  
Taylor examined the picture with her eyebrows getting higher and higher. After nearly a minute, she shook her head, blinked, and checked again.  
  
“Holy shit,” she said numbly. “I’ve got alien TV.”  
  
The fourteen year old girl watched the three entirely non-human but clearly intelligent creatures, that looked slightly like a cross between a human, a bird, and a cat, talk to each other in front of what was clearly some alien form of whiteboard or something of that nature. One of them picked up an implement and wrote something on the pale blue surface in bright red ink while the other two watched. When it finished, it pointed to some other symbology with one of the remaining three four-fingered hand-equivalents it had.  
  
The other two aliens made strange gestures that she fancied were a sort of nod. One of them picked up a weird looking thing that was sitting with several other even weirder looking things on a kind of bench between them and the camera and held it up, two hands pointing to two different aspects of the whatever-it-was while the free one indicated one line on the board behind it.  
  
“I’ve got alien _educational_ TV,” she said in disbelief.  
  
The creature kept apparently explaining aspects of whatever it was it was holding, the one that had written what she was beginning to suspect were a set of equations looking on with what she couldn’t help but think was slightly smug agreement while the last one gave the impression of being the new guy. She had no idea _why_ she thought that, but it certainly was what she thought.  
  
After about five minutes, the demonstrating alien carefully held the device a little higher, prodded one bit of it, then let go.  
  
It hung in the air perfectly stably, making her gape, then look even closer.  
  
“That’s really cool,” she finally smiled, watching as all three aliens started discussing something, the first one motioning to the writing in a manner that suggested explaining it point by point, while the second one kept picking up parts from the bench which were obviously bits of a similar device to the one that was merrily ignoring gravity. The third one appeared to ask questions, quite obvious ones if the body language she imagined she was seeing was real.  
  
“It’s an antigravity 101 class,” she finally decided. “Holy crap.”  
  
There was no sound, but that wouldn’t have done her any good anyway, and the images were more than interesting enough. Making sure that her program was recording all this to the hard drive, she grabbed her pen and a fresh notebook, flipping it open and quickly starting to scribble in it.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Three and a half months later she showed her father her first antigravity machine, along with two hundred pages of theory that explained in detail exactly how it worked and why.


	2. Academic Interests

Angus Drekin, Ph.D, looked up as there was a knock on his office door. Taking his reading glasses off, the sixty-one year old professor of physics carefully folded them and put them in the desk drawer even as he called, “Come in!” He reached out and closed the two notebooks he’d been cross-referencing and slid them to the side of the desk where they joined about forty others, along with a precariously tottering stack of textbooks that had nearly buried his laptop.  
  
He smiled as a familiar person, one he hadn’t seen in some time, entered the office. “Danny Hebert! Welcome, my boy, welcome! And this must be Taylor.” He peered at the young girl who was looking around with great interest, her long curly black hair bringing back memories. “Good lord, she’s the spitting image of Annette,” he breathed, then flinched a little as he realized what he’d said.  
  
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...”  
  
Annette’s husband, a man he hadn’t seen for over a year now, since the woman’s untimely death, shook his head with a sad smile. “Don’t worry, Angus, it’s fine.”  
  
He could see from the look in both their eyes, as Danny put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders, that it _wasn’t_ fine, but said nothing. Getting up with a slight wince as despite his best efforts age was a remorseless bastard, he moved past them and closed the door, then returned to his seat. “I don’t think I ever got the chance to say how much I regret your loss, Danny. And Taylor, of course. Annette was… unique. And sadly missed, I can assure you. She brought a light into every room she entered that I will never forget, nor will any of the faculty of the university.” His voice was quiet but he meant every word.  
  
“Thank you,” Danny murmured, looking at his daughter, who sighed a little and put her own arm around his waist. “We miss her too. More than anything.”  
  
Angus motioned to a pair of chairs next to his desk. “Sit, please. How have you two been since… she passed?” he asked delicately.  
  
“Not as well as we’d like if I’m honest,” Danny replied after sitting and reflecting on the query for a little while. Taylor sat next to him and looked at the floor. Angus was pretty sure she had a tear in one eye. “It’s been very hard in many ways. Waking up and knowing something that should be there isn’t… It takes a long time to get used to.”  
  
“Trust me, my boy, you never get _used_ to it,” Angus said with a knowing look. “You grow accustomed to dealing with the feelings in the end, but they never leave you. I speak from experience, of course. Marcella left me twenty two years ago now and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of her.” He shrugged a little with a tiny regretful smile of his own. “But life goes on. My Marcella wouldn’t have wanted me to dwell overmuch on it to the point of obsession, and I’m certain Annette wouldn’t want either of you to do the same.” He raised a finger. “That does not in the slightest mean that you shouldn’t remember the good times. They get you through the bad ones, trust me on that.”  
  
“Yeah.” Danny put his hand on his daughter’s and gently squeezed it. “I’m coming to realize that. But it’s been hard.”  
  
“As these things always are.” Angus smiled. “The important thing is to remember you still have the living and you can’t change the past, so all you can do is live your life as your loved ones would have wanted you to, to honor their memory. They will never leave you.”  
  
Taylor leaned on her father, who smiled down at her. “Oddly enough that helps. Thank you. And it has been getting better these last few months or so.”  
  
“A pleasure.” Angus felt quite satisfied by the look on their faces. “Now, what brings you to the office of an elderly physicist on such a nice evening?” He glanced at the window, outside which a pleasant August day was finishing as the sun lowered towards the horizon, the golden light streaming across the bay towards the Atlantic and casting long shadows of the few ships moving around it, along with those from the taller buildings near the shore. From the position of his office on the second floor he had a good view of a large chunk of the city down the hill on which Brockton Bay University sat. One of the perks of tenure and seniority. “While I’m always happy for a social call, I can’t help but feel this is something slightly more than that.”  
  
Danny hesitated, glanced at Taylor, then seemed to come to a decision. “We wanted your advice on something a little… strange.”  
  
“ _My_ advice?” Angus was somewhat taken aback. “I’m always happy to help, Danny, but the only advice I’m really qualified to give other than minor help on matters of loss is in the field of physics. Which I like to think I do know quite a lot about, I’ll admit, but it’s somewhat esoteric...” He smiled a little, then felt puzzled as Danny looked at Taylor rather than laughing at his small joke.  
  
“It’s physics advice we need,” Danny said when he looked back. Taylor was hugging a backpack that she’d had with her when they came in.  
  
“A school project or something?” he guessed.  
  
Taylor giggled under her breath, while her father looked fondly although with mild exasperation at her. “Weirdly, that’s not quite as wrong as you’d expect, but it’s not quite right either,” the man muttered. “I suppose you’d better show him, Taylor.”  
  
The girl nodded, then opened her backpack and removed… a thing.  
  
Angus looked at it curiously. It was a small machine about the size of a grapefruit, clearly made with fairly basic machining skills, although neatly and precisely done even so. He could see some tiny circuit boards inside the approximately dodecahedral outer structure, which seemed to be constructed of either aluminum or possibly titanium from the color.  
  
“What on earth is that?” he asked, tilting his head slightly to get a better look. “And where did you get it?”  
  
“I made it,” Taylor said with a somewhat pleased expression as she also studied the thing.  
  
He looked at her, feeling he knew where this might be going. “Is that… the work of a Tinker, then?” he asked carefully, knowing that Parahumans tended towards the secretive, for good reasons in most cases. It was rather impressive that they trusted him if that was in fact what was going on.  
  
“Tinker tech?” Taylor shook her head with a small grin. “Nah. It’s _real_ technology, not some magic machine no one can understand.”  
  
“Hmm.” He studied her now. She had the air of a young person who was rather pleased she knew something you didn’t. In the end he smiled. “All right. What does this real technology do? I assume it _does_ in fact do… something… oh my lord.”  
  
As he’d been speaking she held the little widget out in front of her, pressed a switch on top of it, and let go.  
  
It emitted a very faint hum and a few tally lights blinked on inside it, then the thing placidly stayed exactly where she’d put it, hanging in mid air like that was a reasonable course of action.  
  
He stared at the thing for a good thirty seconds, wordless, until he raised his eyes to meet hers. Which were alight with amusement.  
  
“That...” He cleared his throat. “Is quite impressive, my dear.”  
  
“It’s neat, right?” she chirped happily. “Look.” Reaching out she poked it with a finger, causing it to slide sideways without effort, then stood up and pushed down on it, nearly lifting herself off the floor as it utterly refused to sink any lower. “It’s currently fixed to the reference plane of the center of mass of the Earth, so it stays at a constant distance from it, but it’s free to move orthagonally. Cool, isn’t it?”  
  
Somewhat lost for words, he nodded, then absently retrieved his reading glasses, unfolded them without taking his eyes off the machine floating two feet off the floor in the middle of his office, put them on, and leaned closer. Experimentally he reached out and very cautiously pushed the thing sideways, finding it moved freely without any resistance at all. Putting his hand on top, he pressed down, and felt complete rigidity as if he’d tried pushing it through the floor.  
  
After a moment he put his hand under it and tried _lifting_ only to find the same thing happened.  
  
Sitting back in his chair he pulled his glasses off and tapped his chin with the left arm while studying the device. “Anti gravity?” he finally asked a little weakly.  
  
“Yeah. It’s a gravitational reference frame regenerator.” She smiled at her machine with a look of someone who felt quite satisfied with their work. “It can do other things, like provide thrust, but it needs reprogramming to do it efficiently and safely and I’m still working on that. At the moment it pretty much just holds things up.”  
  
“How?” he asked. “Because I’ve seen Tinker antigravity machines before and they all have limitations, the prime one being that even the Tinker who invents them can’t give a coherent explanation of how they work, and of course they invariably have a limited lifespan for some reason.”  
  
She pulled a binder, the sort of thing you’d find in school, out of her backpack and handed it to him.  
  
Curiously he opened it, then smiled at the first page.  
  
“Taylor’s Gravitational Reference Frame Machine. Mark One Issue Two,” he read out loud. Raising his eyes, he asked, “What happened to the Issue One?”  
  
She rubbed her cheek with a slightly worried glance at Danny, who sighed heavily. “Like I said it needs work on the thrust programming,” she mumbled, sounding embarrassed.  
  
“Which is why we had to patch a hole in the living room ceiling,” Danny said with a fond look at her. “And the guest room ceiling. And the roof.”  
  
Angus started chuckling.  
  
“It sure doesn’t lack power,” Danny added. “She says, ‘ _Watch this, Dad!_ ’ and pokes a switch. Next thing you know there’s a hole we can see daylight through, plaster falling from the ceiling, no machine, and Taylor’s looking about as red as she is now.” He grinned at his blushing daughter. “Damn thing’s probably on the moon by now.”  
  
“It’ll be out of the solar system, actually, Dad,” the girl said with a somewhat amused smile. “I accidentally got it set for two g of acceleration and it would do that until it ran out of power, which would take...” She looked thoughtful. “About two days.” Taylor shrugged. “So I made a new one and disabled that part just in case. I need to work out what went wrong.”  
  
Angus looked from one to the other, amazed at how matter-of-factly they were taking it, then returned his attention to the binder in his hands. Turning the page, he was faced with a nicely done summary of the contents, printed from a computer, and from an instant impression as good as if not better than many of the papers his students produced. Quite likely Annette Hebert’s legacy, he thought. She’d always told him that her daughter was rather more literate than many her age and very intelligent. He suspected she’d rather understated things.  
  
He read the description of the contents, then turned the page again. A quick scan of the equations that met his eyes turned into a much slower and more careful examination, which went on for some time as he kept flipping pages. Occasionally he went back and checked a previous one, then returned to the documentation.  
  
When he finally reached the part where theory gave way to practical engineering notes, along with remarkably carefully drawn schematics and mechanical sketches, he sat back in his chair with a feeling like someone had just given him a much stronger drink than he’d asked for. Angus realized with a start that it was dark out, his chair was now turned towards his desk where the binder rested, and next to it was a calculator and one of his own notebooks which had hastily scribbled math filling several pages.  
  
Pulling his glasses off he blinked then looked around, to see Danny sitting with his legs crossed and stretched out, half asleep and holding a paper cup of coffee in his hand, while Taylor was apparently deeply engrossed in reading one of his textbooks.  
  
He tilted his head to read the title. ‘ _Quantum Chromodynamics_ ,’ by Greiner, Schramm, and Stein, the second edition. Examining her face, he saw she was carefully reading a page about halfway through with a small frown, the tip of her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth.  
  
Amused and somewhat amazed, he shook his head and looked at her machine, which was still blithely ignoring gravity without any effort whatsoever. It was an incredible piece of technology.  
  
Angus looked back at the binder and his notes. ‘ _She’s right too. It’s_ ** _technology_** _, not tinker tech._ ’  
  
That was the utterly bewildering thing. What he’d just spent… he checked… three _hours_ reading through was a fully fledged explanation of precisely _how_ that damned machine was doing what it did, the theory behind a field of gravitational control that rewrote half the stuff he’d learned over his career, and extended Special Relativity among several other things in quite unexpected directions.  
  
Which was completely mad. How had a girl who was around fourteen edging on fifteen possibly come up with something like this _without_ Parahuman abilities? On the other hand, how could a Tinker, or even Thinker, manage to explain in a way that was entirely understandable to current science, even if it showed that a lot of that current science was either wrong or seriously limited, a working theory of antigravity?  
  
It was totally unprecedented as far as he knew. No one had _ever_ managed to do anything with understanding Tinker inventions beyond the smallest, tiniest insight into trivial aspects of them. But _this…_ This was going to change _everything_.  
  
He flipped through the rest of the binder, glancing at the reams of notes on precisely how to duplicate the little device, using technology that was nothing more complex that you’d find in the university mechanical and electronic engineering building. Any decent grad student with a knack for both could make one, although it would be a complex task even so.  
  
Shaking his head, he almost reverently closed the binder, then rested his hand on it, feeling that something fundamental had changed somehow.  
  
“Incredible,” he breathed.  
  
Danny twitched and opened his eyes, before lifting the coffee cup to his lips and draining it. Taylor closed the book she was reading, a little reluctantly, and put it back on the shelf behind the chair, before turning to watch him.  
  
“My apologies, I didn’t realize how invested in this extraordinary document I became,” he said to his visitors.  
  
“Don’t worry, I half expected that,” Danny smiled. Taylor giggled a little.  
  
Angus snorted, then looked at the machine, reaching out to poke it. It slid away from his finger and resumed hanging without a flicker of motion. “I have no words to say how impressed I am. This is likely the single most remarkable thing I’ve ever encountered in my life.” Raising his eyes, he asked the girl, “How did you do it?”  
  
“I like technology and stuff like that, and I like learning,” she replied. “And I got some interesting ideas a while ago. I learned a lot, all sorts of cool stuff, and this was one of the things I came up with.” She frowned at the machine, then reached out to turn it off, catching it with her other hand. Tossing it up and down, she added, “I think I can improve it but I’m happy for a first attempt. Well… second.” Taylor looked slightly guiltily at her father who rolled his eyes but smiled. “Sorry, Dad.”  
  
“We fixed the damage, no one was hurt, and you learned an important lesson about testing antigravity machines indoors,” he chuckled.  
  
“Such lessons are undoubtedly important,” Angus commented in a slightly lightheaded way. He looked at the machine she was holding, then asked, “May I?”  
  
“Sure, Professor,” she replied, smiling, and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hands under the desk lamp, inspecting it closely. The work was not as polished as a trained machinist would produce, tooling marks showing where it had been formed with methods that were effective but those of a gifted amateur rather than a professional. Even so it was very carefully and accurately manufactured, far past the level he’d have expected from someone that young.  
  
The internal circuitry was also handmade, he could see, some of it made with point to point wiring using extremely fine wire, some of it parts of commercial printed circuit boards that had been carefully modified and trimmed to suit the new purpose. Overall it was clearly a prototype, but it was a very _good_ prototype. And, of course, it _worked._  
  
He even knew _how_ it worked. More or less, although it would take a lot of study to derive all the ramifications of her notes. Years, probably.  
  
With a momentary thought that every physicist on the planet was going to both praise and curse the name of Taylor Hebert at the same time for what she’d just done to the field, he handed it back. “What do you intend to do now?” he asked, watching her put it into her backpack. He gave her the binder too, which also went in. “And why did you come to me?”  
  
“Annette trusted you and liked you a lot,” Danny explained. “Taylor insisted this thing was entirely explainable by normal science, although she also keeps saying that normal science gets quite a lot of things wrong.”  
  
“Incomplete, dad,” she protested. “I said it was incomplete. There’s all sorts of cool things no one is thinking about, like how superconductors _really_ work...”  
  
Danny smiled as Angus stared at her. “You see what I have to deal with,” he remarked, making her stick her tongue out at him. “Anyway, I talked it over with some people I trust at the union, and one thing that came up was that as soon as the PRT hears about this, they’re going to be all over us saying it’s the result of a Parahuman power. You know what they’re like.”  
  
Angus slowly nodded. Annette herself had spoken about the PRT in less than glowing terms more than once, and he’d lived long enough and seen sufficient evidence to not entirely trust in their good will himself. “I’m afraid I take your point,” he replied. “They can be somewhat aggressively enthusiastic about taking over any aspect of life they feel is covered by their remit.”  
  
“Tell me about it,” Danny grumbled. “But the idea we had was that if we can prove it’s _not_ Tinker tech, it’s suddenly not their problem. I mean, they won’t _like_ it, I’m pretty certain of that, but if it’s something that anyone trained in the right field could understand, or even make, well...” He spread his hands with an evil grin. “What can they do? It’s perfectly ordinary superscience, not crazy Parahuman powers. We can prove that.”  
  
After a few seconds of staring, Angus burst out laughing. “Oh, lord, there are going to be some _very_ peculiar expressions, I suspect.”  
  
“Probably.” Danny didn’t look worried about that. “The question is, are you interested in helping with the patent?”  
  
Angus examined him for a bit. Then he picked up the notebook he’d made his own calculations in and studied it briefly. “You know, I believe I am, as it happens,” he replied with a smile. “And I have a distinct feeling that there’s a chance the university would be interested in setting up a research program into the new field of gravitational reference frame manipulation.”  
  
“How convenient,” Danny smirked. “Oddly enough, there’s a Union on the docks who have a lot of people who are interested in the practical applications of that field. They might want to collaborate in real world uses.” He held out his hand.  
  
Angus, with a sensation that this was going to be interesting, and a broad smile, shook it.  
  
Taylor was grinning to herself. “Cool,” she said happily. “I’ve got so many other ideas.”  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Standing at her office window, Emily Piggot sipped her coffee, trying to wake up as she stared out across the city and bay far too early on a crisp October morning. It was just cold enough that a mist, due to the damp sea air, had formed as the sun rose and filled the streets below with white, car headlights dimly visible through it. The taller buildings protruded above the ground level cloud, which spread out into the bay for a few hundred yards from shore, gradually dissipating over the warmer water until by the time you got out to the Rig it was only barely obscuring the view.  
  
A number of small trawlers were puttering around on the water, navigation lights still easily visible due to the light level, although the sun was coming up quickly and would soon burn the fog away. She yawned, watching as one group of four boats headed towards the mouth of the bay and the grounded cargo ship blocking most of it, as it had done for nearly two decades, long predating her arrival in this benighted city. They were moving quite rapidly in formation, causing her to wonder where they were going.  
  
After a couple of minutes of watching them, she turned away and sat at her desk, putting the coffee cup down next to the keyboard before prodding the space bar to wake the screen. Reading the list of things to do and meetings to attend she groaned under her breath.  
  
It never ended. There was always _something_ mad going on in this place. Usually something she had to figure out how to fix. It was enough to make her wish she’d stayed in bed some days.  
  
Sighing faintly she opened the first report and started reading. The dense technical jargon that Armsmaster seemed unable to avoid using soon had her wishing the man would take a course on science for the layman, or possibly get Dragon to write it for him. At least _she_ knew how to talk to people who _weren’t_ humorless robots…  
  
Giving up on understanding whatever it was he was trying to explain in excruciating detail that probably only mattered to about four people in the world, she tabbed through the document looking for things she _could_ understand, read the summary, shrugged, and signed it. He knew his stuff even if she didn’t and he wasn’t asking for a budget increase, so for now she’d trust him. If he screwed up, she got to yell at him, so there wasn’t really a down side.  
  
Closing that document she went on to one written by Miss Militia, which was far more understandable by a normal person, and read it carefully. Deciding the request was entirely reasonable she authorized that one too.  
  
So things went for an hour or so, until she decided she needed more coffee. It was still far too early to be working this hard and the caffeine was essential. Getting up she walked over to the coffee machine, put her cup under it, selected the right menu option, and set it going. While the thing gurgled happily away to itself she looked out the window again, seeing that the fog was nearly gone, and she could now easily make out the huge old ship at the mouth of the bay several miles away.  
  
She noticed absently that the small fleet of ships that had gone by earlier seemed to be moored right next to it for some reason. Squinting into the rising sun she wondered what they were doing. The coffee machine started the whirring noise that preceded it filling her mug, distracting her as she waited for it to finish then stirred in some sugar.  
  
Sipping it she walked back to her desk, glancing out the window again as she sat.  
  
She was just in time to see the miles-distant and very large ship lift gently out of the water like it was an oddly shaped balloon, turn ninety degrees over about fifteen seconds, and slowly start floating up the bay with the four smaller ships following beneath it.  
  
The director was still gaping even as her phone started ringing.


	3. Public Reaction

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**Topic: The Flying Dutchman?  
In: Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay ► Weird local shit  
Wizard_of_the_Bay ** (Original Poster)  
Posted On Oct 8th 2010:

OK, either I'm going crazy, or that cargo ship that's been across the mouth of the bay since the riots fifteen or sixteen years ago? You know, the fucking huge thing that's nearly blocked the entire entrance?

It just flew past my office window.

Seriously. Am I actually _seeing_ this? Or is this some bizarre hallucination, or a bad trip or something?

Because if it's actually REAL there's something very, very strange going on.

**Look.** Can anyone else see this? I'm genuinely worrying about my sanity...

**(Showing page 2 of 55)**

**►Brocktonite03** (Veteran Member)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

There _aren't_ any Tinkers around who could FLY a 35000 ton SHIP around like it was a damned kid's toy! Not around here anyway, as far as I know. So I doubt that's the cause.

**►ProfessionalRussian**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

So how _did_ it just up and fly away? They pumped it full of helium or something? :D

And who is _they_ anyway? One of the gangs, or some independent? Maybe a new Trigger?

**►Bagrat** (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

No, I haven't heard anything from any of my normal contacts. But the PRT is going _insane_ from what I can tell. They're launching a VTOL to track it right now, I can see it prepping on the pad.

**►SmithTheSmith**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

So you think we got a new Tinker triggering in the bay and the first thing they did to announce themselves to the world is basically steal a giant wrecked ship? Bit obvious of them, isn't it? And who owns those other ones that are following it?

**►Sothoth**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Hey, Bagrat, any news on whether the Protectorate is investigating as well as the PRT? I bet Armsmaster is looking confused... :D

**►XxVoid_CowboyxX** (Verified Irritating)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

It's got to be aliens!

You know I'm right this time.

**►Normal_Human**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

The day you're right is the day I'll go swimming with Leviathan in a bikini.

And you know that no one wants to see THAT.

Leviathan in a bikini? Where would we get one in his size? ;)

(Seriously, you're wrong. As usual.)

**►LizardLover**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Are these aliens demons too this time? Or are they just the normal sort?

I lose track. Although I liked the lizard aliens. Have you seen them again?

:D

**►XxVoid_CowboyxX** (Verified Irritating)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Why does no one ever believe me? :(

**►Chrome**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Do you _really_ want an answer to that? ;)

**End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4 ... 53, 54, 55**

**(Showing page 3 of 55)**

**►WriterDude**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

In a desperate but no doubt futile as usual attempt to drag this thread back to the actual subject, do we have any PRT people here who can actually give us _information_ rather than just random guesses?

I'm still watching thousands of tons of ship float around like it was cotton candy so to be honest it's kind of freaking me out.

Where's it going?

Who's doing it?

HOW are they doing it?

WHY ARE THEY DOING IT?

I need answers...

**►FoxPix** (Pokemon Expert)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

It's pretty cool though, right? And I bet the mayor is dancing in his office :D

**►Bagrat** (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

I still can't find anything concrete out, but I'm working on it.

It seems likely that the PRT and the Protectorate both will be investigating though.

And yes, FoxPix, I expect the Mayor is quite pleased :D

I don't think the other authorities necessarily are...

**►Reave** (Verified PRT Agent)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

I'm not at liberty to say too much as the situation is clearly in flux, but I've been authorized to comment that this is not, as far as we're aware, an attack of any form, nor is it the work of a villain.

Who it _is_ the work of is something we're attempting to determine.

The public is urged to not panic, remain away from the scene, and not interfere. Please. We all remember what happened the _last_ time ;)

**►XxVoid_CowboyxX** (Verified Irritating)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

That sounds like a government coverup to me. Bet they don't want us knowing about the aliens!

**►ProfessionalRussian**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Oh for...

Please stop. My brain is hurting.

**►TheColorMauve**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Hey, guys? I'm pretty sure those trawlers belong to the Dock Workers. I go fishing off one of the wharfs down there on weekends and I'm sure I've seen them moored on another one. The blue and yellow one is pretty distinctive.

And the big ship is heading towards that end of the bay too. Are they involved?

Another thing, for the last month or so there's been a _lot_ of activity in some of the buildings there, and I've seen quite a few big trucks coming and going. That's more evidence that something's up, in my mind.

**►Chrome**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

So you think the DWU got themselves a Tinker or something?

By the way, is it DWU or DWA? I've heard people call it both the Union (always capitalized, they seem proud of it) and the Association. What's the difference?

**►Bagrat** (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

It used to be called the Dock Worker's Association in the 60s, but the older name was the Dock Worker's Union, and they seem to have gone back to that sometime in the last twenty years. Of course it was originally the Brockton Bay Longshoremen and Stevedore's Union, but that was a long time ago.

Still working on getting more data. Thanks for the input, Reave. Anything else you can pass on would be gratefully received.

**►Wizard_of_the_Bay** (Original Poster)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

The damned thing just splashed down right next to the really long wharf down at the Union place, I can just see it if I lean out the window with my binoculars. So it looks like they _are_ involved somehow. Those trawlers or whatever they are seem to tying up next to it but I can't really make out much from here.

How the hell did they do that?

And of course, why? And who helped them?

It's gotta be a Tinker, but like other people said, I don't know of any around these parts who could do that. And I'm kind of drawing a blank on any that could, to be honest.

Must have cost a fortune though.

**End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 53, 54, 55**

**(Showing page 4 of 55)**

**►XxVoid_CowboyxX** (Verified Irritating)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

_**Aliens...** _:D

**►FoxPix** (Pokemon Expert)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Muppet :D

**►LizardLover**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

ROFL

**►WriterDude**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Seriously, I need more information!

This is getting more peculiar and worrying by the minute.

_Dockworkers?_ **Really?**

**►Chrome**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

They ARE oddly competent, though. I mean, they're still there even after all the shit that's happened in this place over the years. Bit suspicious if you ask ME... ;)

**►ProfessionalRussian**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Oh, god, not _that_ conspiracy theory again...

I swear, this city has more conspiracy theories than actual conspiracy _theorists_.

**►Agent C4T**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

:D :D 

**►Normal_Human**

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Huh. I just saw about five PRT trucks go roaring past in that direction, along with Armsmaster's bike, and three BBPD cruisers. They seem to be in a hurry :)

**►Miss Mercury** (Protectorate Employee)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Investigations are ongoing and the public is urged to leave everything to the authorities.

We know what we're doing.

**►Laserdream** (Verified Cape) (New Wave)

Replied On Oct 8th 2010:

Send help, I can't stop laughing... :D

**End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... 53, 54, 55 **

_**■** _


	4. Official Attention

As they drove through the docks, Mike Renick looked around with slight puzzlement. All the roads they were on seemed far too new for this part of town, which admittedly he hadn’t been through in at least four years. It was still run down, the entire area was, which wasn’t a shock considering how many gang fights had happened throughout the place since, and indeed before, the riots. It had been on the long slow slide to irrelevance even then, long before his time in the city, and after the cargo ship was scuttled across the bay entrance during that period of upheaval the slide had only become faster. The economy of the whole city was far below what it used to be when it was a thriving port, decades ago, with only parts of it still bringing in a real income.  
  
Which of course left little money for civic improvements, this feeding on itself to promote urban decay that left large sections of the city looking like the aftermath of a pretty grim end of the world movie. And ripe territory for the sort of constant background crime that only made things worse for everyone.  
  
However, now… He peered down a side street as they passed. Now all the main roads seemed to have been patched up, quite professionally although he could see where the potholes had been, quite a few of the more dangerous-appearing buildings seemed to have had their doors and windows blocked off, and some of the dodgier looking alleyways had been barricaded over with very solid-looking steel constructions welded up from scrap metal but done very well.  
  
Even the road signs had been replaced. Which was near enough a miracle.  
  
Who had done it and how had they paid for it all?  
  
Yet another mystery. The city wasn’t short of them, true enough, but this was a new one, and new mysteries so often turned bad around these parts.  
  
He glanced in the side mirror, seeing the rest of the cavalcade his truck was in the lead of following along behind them. Armsmaster’s bike could be seen a couple of vehicles back. The Tinker had, somewhat unusually, not rushed ahead and had seemed distracted from the moment he arrived.  
  
Turning his attention to the screen in front of him, he studied the images from the VTOL aircraft orbiting two thousand feet up. “It’s definitely stopped,” he said into his earpiece mic. “Right next to the DWU facility, in the shallows. No signs of any anomalous technology visible, or other Parahuman involvement, as of yet.”  
  
“ _Well, it didn’t just get bored and fly away on its own, so_ ** _someone_** _is behind this_ ,” his immediate superior’s voice grated in his ear. “ _I want to know who that is, how they did it, why they did it, and who they’re working for_.”  
  
“Hopefully we’ll be able to determine the answers to at least some of those questions,” he replied as calmly as possible. Which wasn’t completely calm, of course, as for all they knew they were driving into some bizarre Parahuman ambush...  
  
“ _We’d better. I’m getting heat from upstairs already. Some idiot posted video of that damn ship flying around like it was a kite on the internet and the news is going to town on it._ ” Her voice was even more sour than usual, making him grimace a little. The woman was very competent but by god she could be awkward to deal with when she was in a less than charitable mood. And she _really_ didn’t like surprises.  
  
Rounding the last corner before their destination, they rumbled down a long access road heading towards the shoreline, huge old cranes easily visible towering above the buildings, and through the gaps in the latter glimpses of the water could be seen. Bright sunlight made it all look fresh and clean, hiding the grime of a slowly decaying industrial landscape and turning it into something almost beautiful. They drove past a side road, which went off at an angle to end in a very long wharf that stretched close to a quarter of a mile out into the bay, the far end forming a platform to which half a dozen smaller ships were tied up, bobbing up and down in the waves. Ahead, he could see the tall rusty chain link fence surrounding the core of the old Union facility, with a gate in it behind a pair of red and white striped barrier poles next to a small security hut.  
  
His vehicle pulled up just short of this. A grizzled-appearing man in his forties, wearing a cap and sunglasses, stuck his head out of the window of the guard hut and inspected them. After a moment the head disappeared again, the rest of the man following it out the door as he exited his post and stomped over to them, one hand holding a very large flashlight in a grip that Mike knew full well meant he knew exactly what he was doing.  
  
“Yeah?” he grunted as Mike rolled the window down. “Waddaya want?”  
  
“Mike Renick, Deputy Director, PRT ENE,” he replied, showing his ID card. “We’d like to speak to whoever is in charge.”  
  
“What, all of ya?” the man asked after taking the card and examining it very closely. He looked back along the row of vehicles. “Got a problem?”  
  
“We don’t know yet,” Mike said, smiling a little. “That’s what we want to speak about.”  
  
The man returned his attention to Mike, stared at him for a few seconds, then turned around and went back into his hut. He popped back out again a moment later with a radio to his ear, talking into it quietly enough that Mike couldn’t make out what he was saying. He appeared to read off the details on Mike’s ID to whoever he was talking to, then walked a few feet into the road and looked at the license plate of the truck, reading that off too.  
  
Mike looked at the driver, who looked back and shrugged.  
  
After about thirty seconds, the man nodded and put the radio in his pocket, then came back to the window. He handed the card over. “Boss says you can go in, but if anyone starts anything there’s going to be trouble. Got me?”  
  
Slightly amused, Mike nodded. “I understand.”  
  
The guard went back to his hut yet again and leaned in through the window, did something that made the barriers rise, then a few seconds later the gate slowly retracted with a metallic screech of badly oiled wheels on rusted steel track. When it was fully open, he waved them through. “Turn left, follow access road B to the end, hang a left,” the guard called. “Don’t go anywhere else. Don’t go faster than ten miles an hour. Boss will be waiting for you.”  
  
“Thank you,” Mike called back. The guard merely stood and watched them all go past, then went back into his hut. As they followed the signposted route, Mike could hear the gate squeal closed again.  
  
“Kind of paranoid,” he commented.  
  
“Strange people around here,” the driver replied, looking at the signs then carefully taking the correct path past a series of open workshops which were emitting lots of mechanical sounds and the occasional shower of sparks from some welding operation or something of that nature. The whole place seemed busier than Mike would have expected from what he’d heard about it. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve heard about the Docks.”  
  
“Places next to the sea do seem to attract tall stories,” Mike chuckled.  
  
The driver gave him a dark look. “Not all of them are ‘ _stories_ ’,” he muttered in a low voice.  
  
Renick looked at him, then decided it wasn’t worth commenting on and went back to studying their surroundings. More workshops passed, a number of men and a few women looking back at him as they went by. Some of the expressions were neutral, some were a little unfriendly, but none of them seemed actively hostile. Most of the people just went back to their work.  
  
Eventually they reached the end of the access road they’d been slowly crawling along, finding another one at right angles to it between them and the shoreline, which itself had a raised wall made of concrete and huge chunks of ancient wood lining the edge. To the right it led back along the shore past all the wharves with other roads joining it every now and then, while in the direction they’d been told to go it curved back into what appeared to be a large yard lined with yet more buildings as far as he could see.  
  
However, he raised a hand, saying, “Hold on, I want to have a look at this,” before the driver could turn. The man put the brake on and Mike opened the door, standing on the running board to get a good view over the sea wall.  
  
“God, that’s a big ship,” he mumbled, staring at the enormous vessel that blocked the view of the rig. It was rusty, streaks of red running down the sides from the green superstructure over the dark blue of the waterline, and showed signs of the years of neglect out in the bay. The flying bridge at the back was missing most of the glass, only one of the radar antennae was still in place although it was badly bent, the other two mere stumps, and he could see places where someone seemed to have torn or cut various parts off the deck in the past, but on the whole it was a lot more intact than he expected.  
  
And a crap load bigger. You didn’t really get the full impression until it was only a hundred yards away.  
  
Thinking that this thing had literally _flown_ here, completely out of the water, was mind boggling. After taking a couple of photos with his phone, he got back into the truck and closed the door, noticing that several of the others with him had also taken the opportunity of a better view. “OK, let’s get on with it.”  
  
The driver didn’t bother to reply, merely took his foot off the brake and moved away. The truck rumbled over the somewhat pitted road surface until it entered the side yard at the head of the small convoy, which spread out and stopped. Armsmaster parked his bike next to Mike’s truck and turned it off, dismounting and looking around.  
  
A small welcoming committee was standing near one of the buildings, which was on the larger size of those surrounding them. Next to it were parked two semis, both new, and painted gloss black with no identifying marks at all, along with a heavy duty SUV and half a dozen cars. The three people waiting for them were a tall skinny man with glasses, who looked like a roughly forty year old accountant, a considerably older man probably in his sixties, white haired but appearing in very good condition for his age and wearing a turtleneck sweater over casual clothes, and a heavyset man who was about twice the width of both the other combined. He was only about five foot eight but had a sort of massive quality about him that spoke of a hell of a lot of physically hard work, while his face was somewhat battered but seemed cheerful nonetheless.  
  
Mike got out of the truck, walking over to join Armsmaster, who glanced at him, then followed as he kept going to meet the three men waiting patiently.  
  
“Deputy Director Renick, I assume?” the skinny man asked as he and Armsmaster came to a halt in front of them.  
  
“That would be me, yes. I imagine you recognize my companion.”  
  
“Armsmaster is well known to most of the US, never mind just Brockton Bay,” the man replied with a small smile. He held his hand out. “Danny Hebert. DWU hiring manager and CEO of Gravtec Engineering, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Brockton Bay Dock Worker’s Union. Pleased to meet you.”  
  
Mike, who had reached instinctively for the offered hand, paused briefly as what the man had said went through his mind leaving a trail of questions, then completed the action. “Likewise.”  
  
“This is Professor Angus Drekin, an old friend and our liaison with Brockton Bay University’s Gravitational Physics department. Also the chief science officer of Gravtec.” He motioned to the older man, who smiled and also shook Mike’s hand. “And on the end there is George Kilton, our security chief.”  
  
Kilton also offered his hand, looking rather more amused at the expression Mike was probably wearing than seemed reasonable.  
  
“So, how can we help the PRT today, Deputy Director? Or is this just a social call?” Mr Hebert seemed also to be showing a degree of humor, although it was mixed with mild wariness and a certain level of anticipation. His voice was entirely casual though.  
  
Mike very deliberately looked over his shoulder to where the stern of the huge ship only a few hundred feet away could be seen towering over the buildings, met Hebert’s eyes, and raised his eyebrows meaningfully.  
  
The other man raised his as well in an inquiring manner.  
  
Sighing faintly, Mike pointed. “There is a considerable amount of confusion in official circles about the circumstances that led to _that_ being here, rather than approximately eight miles away where it’s been for sixteen and a half years,” he said flatly. “There is a lot more confusion about how it actually _got_ here. People tend to notice flying cargo ships. Even in Brockton Bay.”  
  
All three men followed his finger, then exchanged glances. “We moved it,” Hebert said calmly. “It was in the way, aside from anything else. The Mayor seems fine with it.”  
  
“He knew about it?” Armsmaster demanded.  
  
Hebert rocked a hand from side to side. “We might not have bothered to mention it to begin with, but we told him when it was on the way,” he smiled. “Marine salvage laws allow us to lay a claim to the wreckage, and the city relinquished all ownership of it years ago, after they ended up stuck with the thing. Like most of the other wrecks out there, in fact.”  
  
“I’m told that when he stopped gaping he danced a little jig on his desk, then started calling up a few shipping companies,” Kilton commented with a smirk. “Man seemed pretty pleased about the bay opening up for work. Gonna do the economy a world of good.”  
  
Mike looked at all of them, seeing that each was clearly enjoying this, and sighed. Rubbing between his eyes with one finger he looked at Armsmaster, who was studying the people as well, his face blank. Which was fairly common to be honest. “That’s not _quite_ what I meant,” he said after contemplating and discarding a number of other responses. “What I am in fact getting at is the little fact that _you flew a thirty five thousand ton ship across the bay!_ This is… unusual. The assumption is that you have one or more Parahumans working for you, which is something we’re quite interested in for a number of reasons. Leaving aside the problems with the NEPEA laws, that was a highly irresponsible and very obvious stunt that...”  
  
Hebert held up a hand. “Let me stop you there, Mr Renick. Firstly, the entire move was entirely in keeping with OSHA rules as they currently stand, and we have the paperwork to prove it, including an environmental impact study done by BBU, a risk assessment study done by the experts at the DWU, and all other relevant documents which we’re happy to provide copies of to you. Secondly, NEPEA doesn’t apply. And thirdly, we have to my knowledge no Parahumans among the DWU or Gravtec, although we don’t care all that much if we do. We just don’t need them.”  
  
Mike stared at him for several seconds. Eventually he said, “I think I’m going to need more than that, since I saw an enormous ship fly fifty feet in the air with my own eyes. There’s no other way to do that than a Parahuman ability to my knowledge. Unless you bought some very expensive Tinker tech. Toybox, perhaps?”  
  
“No, all the technology we use is locally produced,” Professor Drekin put in, seeming to find the entire exchange highly entertaining. “And has absolutely no connection to Tinker work, I can assure you of that.”  
  
Turning to him, Mike asked, “How can you be so sure?”  
  
“Because I understand the theory of the design myself, it’s fully documented, and in fact has acquired a patent within the last three days. As you probably know you can’t patent Tinker tech.” Drekin smiled.  
  
Armsmaster raised his hand, opened his mouth, and paused. Everyone looked at him. After a moment he said, “It is correct that you cannot patent Tinker tech, although there have been many patents as a result of insights into the study of it,” and lowered his hand, giving Mike the impression that what he’d said wasn’t what he’d initially _intended_ to say.  
  
“Indeed,” Professor Drekin nodded. “However in this case, Gravtech’s proprietary technology is entirely unrelated to any Tinker invention.”  
  
A few more seconds passed, then Mike sighed. This was going to get strange, he could feel it in his bones. “Please excuse me, I need to talk to my superiors,” he said.  
  
“No problem, take as long as you want,” Hebert replied magnanimously. Mike turned and walked back to the truck, got in, closed the door, and rubbed his eyelids with his fingertips. Then he tapped his earpiece.  
  
“ _Well?”_ Emily didn’t sound all that patient. “ _What’s going on?_ ”  
  
“Things just got _very_ complicated,” he said tiredly.  
  
“ _Explain_.”  
  
He did. When he’d finished telling her what had happened, while watching Armsmaster stand where he’d left the man, apparently carefully studying the entire area, with the three others watching both him and Mike, there was a long silence.  
  
Eventually Emily growled under her breath. “ _Bullshit. It’s got to be Tinker hardware somehow, or_ ** _maybe_** _some form of powerful telekinesis, a flying Brute, or something else like that. It’s definitely connected with Parahuman crap. Find out what they’re hiding._ ”  
  
“We actually have a fairly weak case, Director,” he said carefully, mindful of her current short temper. “We’re on private land, I’m not sure a crime has actually been committed if they’re right about the ship’s legal status, and merely suspecting they have a tame Tinker or something like that isn’t really good grounds for going in hard.”  
  
“ _They flew a nine hundred foot long ship across the entire bay!_ ” she snapped. “ _That sent a message. They could fly it across the city just as easily and if they dropped the damn thing..._ ”  
  
He winced, able to see her point, paranoid as it was. In this line of work paranoia wasn’t always a bad thing.  
  
“True,” he admitted. “On the other hand, they _didn’t_ make any form of threat, they seem to have been careful about what they did do, and if Hebert is to be believed they even have the paperwork showing the whole thing.”  
  
“ _I don’t really care right now,_ ” she growled in his ear. “ _I’m getting flak like you wouldn’t believe from way above your pay grade, several people I’d rather never have anywhere near me are threatening to come and investigate, and the press is going crazy. Find out what happened, how it happened, and who did it. Now_.”  
  
Suppressing a sigh, he replied, “All right, I’ll do my best.”  
  
“ _Do better than that_.” She disconnected with a click, making him wince.  
  
“God, Emily, who pissed in _your_ wheaties this morning?” he grumbled as he climbed out of the truck again. Behind him the driver suppressed a slight snicker.  
  
Rejoining the others, he said, “My superiors are… not entirely convinced that the event in question was not the action of Parahuman abilities. They are also concerned that the… display… could under some circumstances be considered potentially threatening, and as such are asking for more assurances that this is not the case. And towards that end they have directed me to continue my inquiries.”  
  
Danny Hebert looked at him for a long moment, then turned to Professor Drekin and held out his hand. The professor sighed a little and handed him ten dollars.  
  
Putting it in his pocket with a momentary grin while Kilton chuckled, Hebert said, “Your superiors are even more paranoid than I expected, although I’m genuinely impressed with how you put that.” He seemed to mean it. “All right. We knew this was going to happen, and we’ll allow you and Armsmaster inside. However!” He held up one finger. “This is a private facility, with a significant number of proprietary designs present, which represents a considerable investment of time and money from our company and our customers. As such, before you can come in, you need to sign NDAs.”  
  
Mike stared at him as he pulled a folder out from an inner pocket of his jacket, opened it, and removed two sets of stapled together paper, about nine pages each. He handed one to each of Mike and Armsmaster, while the professor held out two pens.  
  
Eventually Mike shook his head, quickly skimmed through the NDA seeing it was pretty standard as such things went, carefully read the last paper, sighed, and signed it on behalf of the PRT ENE. He gave it back to Hebert who popped off the duplicate back page and gave it back. “Thank you.”  
  
Armsmaster had signed his without comment, although Mike was pretty certain he’d read the entire thing. The man was a ridiculously fast reader, he knew that from long association with him.  
  
When Hebert returned the copy to Armsmaster, who folded it and put it away in his armor, he smiled. “Excellent. Please follow me, gentlemen.”  
  
Turning, he walked back into the building, the professor next to him, and Kilton bringing up the rear. Armsmaster followed as did Mike. They went through a heavy and apparently armored door into a modern and well equipped office suite quite out of keeping with the exterior of the building, past a series of rooms with a total of about twenty people working on computers in them, and stopped in front of another door, even more heavily armored than the first one had been. It had a high security lock to one side which made Mike stare slightly, as it was not only similar to the ones the PRT itself used, but was clearly a more advanced and newer model. Which was… odd… as they were hellishly expensive and very hard to lay hands on, needing government authorization to purchase.  
  
His sensation that things were becoming far more complex than he expected was growing by leaps and bounds.  
  
Hebert put his hand on the scanner, allowed it to do the relevant operations, said “Two guests,” and waited. The system pondered the situation for half a second then there was a clunk and the door unlocked, before sliding sideways into a much thicker than seemed reasonable wall.  
  
“Your security is exceptional,” Armsmaster commented with interest, watching all this.  
  
“Thanks,” Kilton replied. “Although obviously that’s not all of it.”  
  
“Obviously,” the Tinker nodded, striding forwards through the opened door after Hebert and the professor. Mike, feeling like this was getting out of hand, followed. Once they were all through the door slid closed and relocked with a solid crunch.  
  
On the other side was a long corridor that led about a hundred yards or so, probably all the way to the end of the building, with a few doors down one side. The other side was blank. Mike tried to work out the geometry and decided that side was basically the edge of the building itself. So there must be something like a fifty yard space to their left, giving a significant amount of room since the building was about three stories high from the outside. It had looked like something that had once been used for storing trawlers or something of that nature, although it had clearly had a major upgrade recently. The smell of fresh paint lingered, as did a faint scent of concrete still setting.  
  
Wondering yet again who was paying for all this, and if they were involved with all the work on the way here, he followed as the small party passed several doors with cryptic labels on, finally ending at the last one. This had ‘ _No Entry Without Authorization_ ’ written on it in serious letters, over the words, ‘ _Caution – Risk of Gravitational Shear. Do Not Cross Hazard Lines When Lights In Operation._ ’  
  
‘ _Oh, that’s not worrying at_ ** _all_** _,_ ” he thought numbly.  
  
Armsmaster read the sign, then slowly nodded. He seemed impressed.  
  
Hebert put his hand on another lock scanner, this one not apparently requiring a verbal password, then depressed the handle and opened the door. Standing aside, he said, “After you,” with a rather evil grin.  
  
Despite his misgivings, Mike walked in through the door, finding himself rather unexpectedly on a steel catwalk about twenty feet up, showing that the building was actually over a large cavity in the ground. It became apparent that it had in fact once been an indoor dry-dock or something like that many years ago. The area he was looking at was one huge room, painted white, with a bright yellow overhead gantry crane that seemed to have been recently refurbished. Dozens of high powered lights hung from the ceiling above them. Off to the side there was a control room that stuck out about thirty feet over the yawning space, a number of people visible inside it through the glass windows. Yellow hazard lights were rotating in a number of places around the room, sending flashes of illumination across everything.  
  
He took all that in with a glance, but his attention was inevitably drawn to the thing right in front of him as he slowly approached the safety railing and put his hands on it. Dimly aware of Armsmaster doing the same, he simply gaped at the thing hanging in mid air fifteen feet off the floor, showing no signs at all of caring that there was nothing surrounding it other than empty space.  
  
No one said anything for a while. Eventually he pointed. “What is that?” he asked weakly.  
  
“Our spaceship?” Professor Drekin sounded highly amused. “It’s a spaceship. Prototype, of course, it’s basically just the hull and the gravity control system so far, and as you can see there’s quite a lot of work to do yet. But the pressure hull is complete and the airlocks are installed. We used something designed for small submersibles.”  
  
Mike kept looking at the cigar-shaped thing, eighty feet long and about twenty in diameter at the widest point, with wide eyes.  
  
“The whole thing is loosely based on a submarine, in fact,” Hebert added. “You’d be surprised how closely a lot of marine designs fit a spacecraft one when you look at it in the right way. We salvaged the bulk of the hull from a number of pressure tanks we had lying around, welded them together, and added the rest. It’s a work in progress.”  
  
“Nice and shiny though,” Kilton said.  
  
“Of course, spaceships are always supposed to be shiny, everyone knows that,” Hebert agreed mildly. “Anyway, that’s not really why you’re here, is it. You want to see proof that we don’t use Tinker tech. All we’re using is superscience, which is an entirely separate field outside your specific mandate, but we’ll play ball. Come this way.” He turned and headed for the control room, Mike and the others trailing along behind him. Mike kept looking at the thing floating blithely in the middle of the room with amazement.  
  
Just before they reached the control room, a young female voice echoed through the large space, “Test run twenty-nine complete. Power draw nominal, no errors logged, stand by for shutdown.”  
  
She sounded like a schoolgirl, but one who was practiced at her job.  
  
“Area is clear. Powering down in three… two… one. Field decay rate as expected.” The floating machine gently lowered itself to the ground, settling into a cradle made to hold it. “Gravitational reference frame resync complete. Area is safe to enter.”  
  
The warning lights went out and a subliminal hum that Mike hadn’t consciously noticed until it wasn’t there any more died away. Hebert reached the door to the lower level of the control room and opened it, waving them through. Inside was a large room that was clearly an electronics and mechanical engineering workshop, with lathes and milling machines down the back, and down each side long workbenches covered in more electronic test equipment and tools than Mike had ever seen in his life. Armsmaster stopped dead and looked around, his lips actually curving up slightly in one of the most clear examples of respect the other man had ever seen out of him.  
  
“Highly impressive, Mr Hebert,” he stated, walking over to inspect one machine tool closely. “The model 817. An excellent choice.”  
  
There were about a dozen people in the room working at the benches, and one of the milling machines, which was emitting a faint whirring sound as it carved a block of metal into something else, white coolant mixing with chips all over the inside of the transparent shield surrounding it. A couple of them looked up for a moment, then went back to their work as if an unexpected Armsmaster in their midst was not worth commenting on.  
  
Mike watched as a couple of them, a man and a woman in their mid twenties, who looked like university students, carefully assembled a machine about a foot tall on the bench in front of them. A dozen or so more identical ones were off to one side, apparently finished, while on another bench several more were having their external casing fitted. Around the room were a number of other such devices of different sizes, while directly opposite the door another young man was connecting a cable to a fist sized version. He fiddled with the computer in front of him, then nodded in satisfaction when the thing lifted off the bench and hung in the air about a foot up. Reaching out he prodded it, then pushed hard, nodding again when it refused to move in any direction.  
  
After a number of seconds, Mike looked around once more, seeing that the far end of the room from the machine tools had a single large window overlooking the area outside, while in the corner was a set of stairs that led up to the next floor. One of the technicians disappeared up the stairs as he watched, then came back moments later carrying a laptop computer.  
  
Shaking his head, he turned to the three other men. “OK, I’m impressed. What am I impressed _by?_ This could still all be Tinker stuff, although I’ll admit I’ve never seen a Tinker lab like it.”  
  
Every other person in the room turned to look at him.  
  
He looked around, feeling a little intimidated by the attention. Then one of the women giggled. “Tinker technology isn’t _technology,_ ” she said calmly before resuming whatever it was she was doing. “Gravtech _is_.”  
  
“Sally is right, but allow me to prove it,” Professor Drekin chuckled. “Come with me, please.” He led the way to the stairs, ascending them quickly, with Mike and Armsmaster following. Hebert stopped to have a word with one of the people working at a bench, then came after them. At the top of the stairs they entered another large room, this one filled with almost nothing but computers arranged around the walls and on a couple of consoles across the middle of the space, like pictures Mike had seen of the old Apollo mission control. Much of the hardware looked brand new, although some was clearly not.  
  
He noticed that a girl, about fifteen or so, was sitting at one of the consoles examining a large monitor covered with dense graphs, nodding to herself as she followed one line with the eraser end of a pencil, before scribbling something in a notebook. She looked about the right age to have had it be her voice he’d heard earlier.  
  
Professor Drekin led them to the back of the room, which had a number of dividers separating the final ten feet into several smaller rooms. He went into one and waved them to some chairs. Armsmaster sat rather cautiously since his armor was very heavy, but while the chair creaked a little it held. Mike took the one next to him, while Hebert sat in the last one. “As you’ve seen, we’re actively researching the practical applications of Gravtech’s gravitational control technology here. The theoretical work is largely done at BBU. The Union has provided us with the facilities to perform some of the larger work, and we hand them the heavy industrial jobs as they have a vast amount of experience in such things. Between us, we have quite a lot of capability.”  
  
He picked up a small faceted machine from the desk he was sitting at, turning it over in his hands reflectively. “This is the one that started the whole thing,” he mused, studying the device with a small smile. “The key to a field that will...” He shook his head. “Unless you’re a physicist you have no _idea_ how important the concepts behind this little invention are. But they have a large number of useful applications we’ve barely tapped yet.”  
  
Holding it out he pressed a switch, then let go. Mike watched as it entirely failed to drop to the floor. Gently flicking it with a finger, the professor slid it through the air towards Armsmaster, who raised a hand and stopped it as it reached him. He leaned in closely and studied it, before experimentally pushing down on it with an armored hand.  
  
Nothing at all happened. He pressed harder, until Mike could hear the servos in his power suit whine under the load. Releasing the pressure, he put a hand under it and lifted, with the same complete lack of result. His mouth twisted into a thoughtful grimace and Mike suspected that if he could see the man’s face his eyebrows would be lifted quite a bit.  
  
“Very impressive. I assume it is producing an internal reference frame that overrides that of the standard one surrounding us, producing in effect an immovable object?”  
  
“Essentially yes, although it’s somewhat more complex than that, of course,” Drekin nodded, smiling. “You know more about this than I expected. No disrespect intended.”  
  
“Understood,” Armsmaster replied absently, prodding the floating machine sideways, then back again. He located the power switch and pressed it, his other hand under the device, which landed in his palm. Lifting it to his face he closely examined it. “Excellent work, for what I assume is an untrained individual? Good tolerances, superior soldering skills, very neat and efficient use of space given the constraints of repurposing commercial circuitry.” Turning it over, he looked in through one of the holes in the side, nodding slowly. “And the hand assembled parts are remarkably well done. Your work?”  
  
“No, I’m merely a theorist, practical work of that nature is well out of my expertise, although I can appreciate when I see it,” the professor smiled. “The one who invented that is far past me in such things.”  
  
“Your Tinker, I assume,” Mike said.  
  
Armsmaster leaned over and handed the device back to the older man. “You said you could prove this is not Tinker technology?” he asked mildly. Professor Drekin looked at him, glanced at Mike, then pulled a sheaf of papers out of the drawer on the desk. He handed it to Armsmaster without a word.  
  
The Tinker accepted the bound paperwork, examined the cover with interest for a moment, then started flipping through it. The page turning slowed after the first four or five, slowed further after another dozen, and stopped entirely after two more.  
  
Renick watched as he stared at one page, then turned back several and ran his finger down the columns of equations. After about a minute he nodded, his lips moving slightly as if he was silently having a conversation with someone, before he went back to his original place. Slowly turning the pages he read the next five, then flipped quickly through the rest, pausing on an appendix full of schematics and drawings. Finally he lowered the document and stared into space for some time.  
  
Both Hebert and Drekin were watching him with what looked like amusement. Mike was wondering what had just happened.  
  
“This is not Tinker tech,” Armsmaster finally said in an almost dreamy voice, totally unlike _anything_ Mike had ever heard from him before.  
  
“No. It’s not.”  
  
“This completely rewrites at least forty percent of accepted physics, opens up a number of fields previously thought impossible, and implies a number of quite unusual things about the nature of the universe itself,” the man added, still in that odd tone.  
  
“Indeed it does.” Drekin was smiling.  
  
“I actually _understand_ how it works,” Armsmaster said very quietly.  
  
“Hits you hard, when you realize, doesn’t it?” Drekin chuckled. “I had the same reaction.”  
  
Looking back and forth, Mike wondered what the hell was going on. “Are you saying that it’s definitely not the work of a Parahuman, Armsmaster?” he asked cautiously.  
  
The man didn’t respond for a couple of seconds, then twitched and handed the document back to the professor who accepted it and put it on the desk. Turning to Mike, the Tinker replied, “The technology is not Parahuman in nature, that much is clear.” He shook his head slightly. “I cannot say for certain that the individual who invented it is _not_ a Parahuman, however.”  
  
As Mike was about to ask another question, the girl from outside, who was tall and gangly with long curly hair, stuck her head through the door. “Sorry to interrupt. Dad, Brendan is here, he’s brought some more equipment and a purchase order too. Project Hawkflight got approved. He wants to discuss the next phase.”  
  
“Thanks, Taylor,” the man said. “Sorry, I have to leave for a moment, but I’ll be back,” he added as he turned to Mike and Armsmaster. “Got to keep our backers happy. They’re paying for a lot of this.” With a quick grin he followed the girl out of the small office and disappeared.  
  
“What is project Hawkflight?” Armsmaster asked curiously.  
  
“Not covered by that NDA, so I can’t tell you, I’m afraid,” Professor Drekin replied, smiling. “However, going back to your comment moments ago, the inventor of this device, and a considerable number of other breakthrough technologies, is definitely not a Parahuman. We had an MRI scan done to prove it.” He shrugged. “A polymath on the level of Tesla or Da Vinci at least, definitely, with more raw ability in a number of fields than anyone I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing before, but it’s entirely within normal human ability. Admittedly at the extreme end of it, but within it. As such, it’s nothing to do with the PRT _or_ the Protectorate.”  
  
He leaned forward, smiling a little toothily. “Believe me, we checked. We knew this was going to come up sooner or later.” Sitting back, he shrugged.  
  
Pondering his words, Mike glanced at Armsmaster, who was staring at the small machine on the professor’s desk. Eventually he said, slightly reluctantly, “My superiors are still going to want proof of that, I’m afraid.”  
  
“Not going to take our word for it, then?”  
  
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”  
  
“Will you take _my_ word for it, son?”  
  
Mike turned at the unexpected voice, to see someone wearing more military decorations than he’d ever personally encountered standing in the door to the office looking at them. He was about sixty or so, tall and fit with a military haircut and a small white mustache. Mike thought he looked vaguely familiar, but couldn’t place him.  
  
“Hello, Angus,” the man, a brigadier general in the Air Force by the insignia, said to Professor Drekin. “Trouble?”  
  
“No, Brendan, I think we’ve got it under control, it’s just what we expected to happen,” the other man replied. “The Deputy Director’s superiors appear to be a little… insistent.”  
  
“That would be Emily Piggot, I believe,” the new arrival nodded. “Good woman, practical, but hard on herself as much as anyone else. She’s probably getting pressure from above. I’ll look into it.”  
  
“Thanks, that would probably help,” Drekin replied.  
  
Turning to Mike, who stood, he held out a hand. “Brigadier General Doctor Brendan Calhoun, DARPA,” he introduced himself. Mike rather numbly shook the hand offered. “You can go back to Director Piggot and assure her that nothing happening here is anything she is directly concerned with. Entirely Tinker free, I can assure you. And our resident genius is certainly not a Parahuman. We did check rather carefully for a number of reasons.” He smiled, his mustache twitching. “One of those obviously being in anticipation of exactly this moment.”  
  
“What is _DARPA_ doing in Brockton Bay?” Mike managed to say.  
  
“Investing in our future, son,” the man chuckled. “A future that’s going to be a little different. But that’s above your pay grade, so you should probably go back to your Director and pass on the word that everything is in hand and shouldn’t cause her any issues with her own jurisdiction.”  
  
Standing, Armsmaster turned to Mike. “I believe we have no reason to stay any longer, Deputy Director. I have learned what I needed to know.” He looked at Professor Drekin. “Thank you.”  
  
“You’re more than welcome.”  
  
“I will locate and examine your patent, and I may wish to talk further about licensing it for my own purposes,” the Tinker continued.  
  
“We’re open to such arrangements, of course,” Drekin smiled. “I’ll have the marketing department send you an information package.”  
  
“That would be acceptable.” Armsmaster paused, then said, “While I now believe that this is not a Parahuman-involved operation, there are those that won’t, or won’t care. Attracting the attention of certain parties is almost inevitable. What will you do if one of the gangs attempts to… insist… on acquiring your knowledge and abilities?”  
  
General Calhoun chuckled. “Deal with the problem,” he commented. “And we’re not limited to your rules of engagement if a domestic or foreign terrorist attempts to attack a facility funded in part by the US government.”  
  
 _‘Oh, god, this is not going to end well_ ,’ Mike thought with dismay.  
  
He was still thinking that when he walked into Director Piggot’s office and sat down for a very likely difficult conversation.


	5. Friendly Chat

Taylor watched as the tall gleaming figure of Armsmaster followed her father and Professor Drekin down the stairs and out of the control room, Deputy Director Renick walking behind them looking like he’d heard something that worried him. As they disappeared from view, her attention turned to the three monitors in front of her. The left one had a feed from the dozens of tiny but incredibly good security cameras that were all over their new building and outside too, the computer automatically tracking motion and following the small party through the building and out the main door into the courtyard to where the rest of the PRT contingent was waiting more or less patiently.  
  
The one on the right had the results of the last test run of her modified reference frame generator still on it, showing that the projected field emitter had worked perfectly, making her feel very pleased. Her insight into an aspect of the theory she’d first learned from a very distant education broadcast had led to some interesting offshoots the classes she’d so far studied intensively hadn’t mentioned. It seemed obvious to her when she sat down and thought hard about how it worked, but at least as far as she could see her alien benefactors either hadn’t thought of it, or hadn’t yet brought it up in the series, which was clearly intended to train new science students in that field.  
  
She’d spent many happy hours watching and re-watching the recordings, learning a little more each time. The math had been easy enough to decode as math was pretty universal, although working in base sixteen was a little strange. It had been familiar to her of course as it was more or less required for learning programming, which she’d always had an interest in from an early age, and had been encouraged by both her parents to learn more about. Her mother had told her when she was only about six or seven that computers ran half the world already and by the time she was an adult would probably run most of it, so it was important to learn how they worked if you wanted to understand things. It was a good piece of advice that had certainly been accurate.  
  
Her father had muttered something about computers stealing the jobs of hard working people, but had looked like he didn’t really mean it. He was in a position where that sort of comment was expected, though, and she was aware even then that some people really did think like that. He’d certainly never stood in her way of learning anything she wanted, and had quietly but actively helped her whenever she found a new interest, usually managing to scrape up something that would help. The Union had an awful lot of odd stuff secreted away around the place, the remnants of who knew how many old companies that had gone under over the decades, and had been ultimately collected and stored away for a rainy day by the dock workers. Some of it was used for maintaining the machinery that was still in operation, some was broken up for scrap, but a surprising amount of it was stashed carefully into a warehouse somewhere and sat on just in case.  
  
It amused her that most of the local Tinkers would probably be furious that so much good stuff was right under their noses, since they spent a lot of time rummaging through scrapyards and similar places for parts, never realizing that all the really choice bits got intercepted long before they ended up there. On the other hand, it had kept the Union far more functional over the years than one might expect, and had been a boon for many of her experiments over the years.  
  
It was amazing what you could find if you knew who to ask and had an inside man, so to speak…  
  
Her mother had always seemed to find the whole thing rather funny.  
  
So when she’d decided at the age of nine that she wanted to get into ham radio, it hadn’t taken long before an elderly but functional general coverage receiver had appeared in the back of her dad’s truck, complete with a dogeared manual. Half a dozen books on the theory had quickly turned up, her mother asking a few of her students who knew about that sort of thing for recommendations, and her dad had got Kurt and a couple of others from the yard to come and help put up a tall antenna on the side of the house outside her bedroom window, the whole thing ending up as a combined antenna-raising and barbecue party.  
  
Six months after that she’d passed her technician class license test, and had a two meter transceiver sitting on top of the lower frequency receiver. Learning Morse code hadn’t taken very long when she decided she wanted to know how to decode the messages she picked up from all over the place, and the collection of hardware grew steadily as she acquired random bits from different places. By the time she was twelve she had her extra class license and had build a number of transmitters and receivers from scratch, including an amateur TV system she was still proud of.  
  
The research into communication theory in general had stood her in good stead when she had the first sudden realization that something she’d read about the quantum nature of reality implied that it should be possible to send a signal, or indeed _receive_ a signal, in a way that didn’t pass through normal space-time. It had taken her nearly eighteen months of careful work to figure out a possible method for that to be done and build the prototype of what she privately termed a subspace communicator, but the results had exceeded her wildest dreams and opened up a whole vast new world of things to learn about, which she was more than happy to dive headlong into.  
  
Along the way, of course, she’d picked up a lot of self-taught skills in soldering, circuit design, mechanical engineering, and other fields which when added to her programming knowledge had made the whole job easier. Professor Drekin had seemed somewhat startled when she’d explained some of her other theories, apparently believing it was unusual to be able to do what she was doing, but she herself found that a little weird. So much of it was obvious when you thought about it carefully. The hard part was actually _doing_ it, and that was mostly a matter of either finding or making the right equipment. Her massive haul from the old TV shop had been the key to that in the end.  
  
She wished she was better at some of the more complex math though; working out the multidimensional eigenvectors sometimes took quite a lot of scribbling and it would have saved time to be able to do all of it in her head. She _was_ getting slowly better at that sort of thing, even though anything more than seven dimensions at once needed something to write on. Practice did after all help.  
  
Of course, once her dad had decided to show her work to the professor, things had kind of snowballed. When he’d finally stopped practically dancing with excitement, he’d said he was going to need to think about the best way to proceed and he’d get back to them in a couple of days or so. She’d just gone back to watching alien classes in interesting physics and fiddling with some ideas all that sparked, while trying to work out how to decode the sound subcarrier that was still taunting her, buried in the signal. And studying the books on comparative linguistics she’d pulled out of her mother’s own library in an attempt to try to figure out the written language of her unknown teachers. Learning their symbology as far as the equations went was slowly helping with this task, but she thought it would take quite a while to crack it.  
  
She was patient, though. There was no hurry and she was learning all sorts of other things in the process. Learning was a lot more fun, she’d long since decided, when it was on your own terms and things you sought out rather than had pushed on you.  
  
Ir was ultimately nearly a week after first talking to Professor Drekin that he came over for dinner and they discussed a number of options for moving ahead. Her dad had been worried about the gangs and the PRT, in equal measure and Professor Drekin had come up with a possible solution to that problem and several others, which after a lot of thought they’d decided to proceed with.  
  
Luckily, due to various contacts he had in the wider scientific community, he’d been able to contact Doctor Calhoun at DARPA, who was conveniently also very high up in the military. It had taken some persuasion but in the end the general had been convinced to visit BBU and meet with the professor, who had demonstrated her prototype machine to him.  
  
The professor was still grinning about the reaction nearly four hours later when she was introduced to Doctor Calhoun, who had looked like someone had just hit him unexpectedly with something heavy. He’d been flipping through the slightly updated version of her documentation with a completely baffled but still hilariously excited expression, mumbling to himself. It had been very funny.  
  
At first he hadn’t believed that it was all her work, then when she’d managed to prove it to his satisfaction, had decided that she had to be some unusual form of Parahuman. While she was fairly certain that she _wasn’t_ , having read up on the background to Parahuman powers and classifications some time ago out of interest and deciding that there was definitely an awful lot missing from the whole story, she was amenable to being tested to prove it one way or the other. After considerable discussion the general had arranged to fly her father and her, along with her prototype, a copy of the documents, and Professor Drekin, down to Virginia and the DARPA main facility in Arlington. It had been her first trip on an aircraft since she was ten and was a lot of fun. Especially as it was a private jet and she got to look at the cockpit.  
  
An hour and a half after landing early in the morning right at the end of August, all of them were in a room about six floors underground talking to half a dozen people, including an internationally famous physicist, who’d spent the first ten minutes looking dismissive, the next two hours looking both fascinated and stunned, and the last ten minutes staring at her like he’d seen a ghost. It had been kind of odd, but he was polite once he got over the initial disbelief, so there was that.  
  
A couple more military guys had also been present, one from the Air Force like Doctor Calhoun, and one from some bit of the Army she hadn’t quite worked out. They’d gone _very_ quiet when she showed her prototype working while writing out the equations governing the functioning of the reference frame generator on a large whiteboard.  
  
One of the other people, a slender and sharp-faced redheaded woman in a suit, had looked at the data, then talked quietly to Doctor Calhoun in the corner of the room for about half an hour, before disappearing for another forty minutes. When she came back she headed straight for him, the pair talking again for quite a while, before she shook his hand, nodded, and left. Taylor hadn’t seen her again and was still wondering who she was.  
  
After the demonstration was over, she’d spent a solid three hours answering question after question from everyone there, including Doctor Calhoun, and even Professor Drekin. They’d gone over her document page by page as if they were trying to find a flaw with it, but she’d been able to show that the work was accurate and complete. When _that_ was finished she’d been asked if she thought she could build another one for them.  
  
Of course she’d said yes, if they had the parts she needed. The machine wasn’t terribly complex for the most part and she knew the circuits and dimensions by heart. The end result of that had been her finding herself in a large and incredibly well equipped workshop full of hardware she nearly drooled over, along with three technicians who were apparently aware of the purpose of her being there although clearly skeptical.  
  
Having looked around for a bit, she gathered together all the parts she needed, the tech guys helping her very efficiently even though at least one of them seemed to be humoring her. While she’d been using one of the really cool projection microscopes and building a new copy of her circuitry under it, finding that it allowed her to do a much more compact and neater job and resolving that she _really_ needed one of her own, she’d asked them to take the drawings of the outer shell and the tesseract coil former and machine them for her.  
  
It took two of them a while to program up the little benchtop multi-axis CNC mill with the data needed but only about four hours later she was looking at a really professionally made duplicate of the mechanical parts of her device. Impressed, she’d thanked them profusely then carefully wound the tesseract coil with the strangely pretty layered windings in four different thicknesses of copper wire, the final exciter coil made of solid silver. In her original two prototypes she’d had some trouble getting this last bit as it was quite expensive but a jewelry supply shop online had sold her twenty feet of it for only a slightly extortionate price which her dad had paid with a mild wince. Luckily the wire was very thin so there wasn’t all that much silver in it.  
  
Eventually, sometime in the evening, she was finally done with the copy of her original machine. It looked almost identical but was much cleaner, none of the file marks her hand-build one had shown visible, and the circuitry was neater too. This last bit had mostly been down to practice as it was still hand made, since she had no way at that point to make printed circuit boards herself.  
  
Even so, it worked perfectly. Taylor had put the three C cells into it, closed it up, and run the diagnostics on the old laptop she’d brought with her. When everything passed she’d unplugged the USB cable from the innards of the machine, held it out, pressed the power button with her thumb, and casually let go, grinning at the expressions of everyone other than her father and the professor. Both of them looked tired and were holding large paper cups half-full of coffee, but they’d looked proud too.  
  
“I told you, Brendan,” Professor Drekin had said, turning to Doctor Calhoun, who just nodded, his expression showing multiple emotions.  
  
“You did,” he’d replied after a few seconds. “You very much did.”  
  
All three techs had gaped, looked at each other, then spent some time very carefully examining her work with growing excitement. She herself, pleased but suddenly exhausted after a very long day, had left it with them and been taken along with her father and the professor to another building that was set up like a very high end hotel and shown to their rooms. She’d fallen asleep almost immediately, the excitement of the day not managing to offset the tiredness of having spend most of it talking or working hard. Even as she drifted off she decided she had no regrets though.  
  
The next two days had involved more medical tests than she’d ever experienced before in her entire life, including a couple of hours in a very noisy MRI scanner holding very still. When that finally ended she’d thought of at least two improvements it needed and added them to the mental list of things to look into, with possible reference to better superconductors. She’d learned some interesting things about that field from her special lessons which seemed applicable to a lot of places, but that wasn’t really the main concern at that time.  
  
The end results of the scans showed what she’d expected, that she wasn’t a Parahuman. There was no sign of the special brain structure that was generally considered proof of powers and was a critical part of the whole definition of ‘ _Parahuman_ ’ as far as the law went. Doctor Calhoun had actually breathed a sigh of relief at that point, which amused her.  
  
The fact that the three techs she’d worked with had successfully built another copy of her prototype over those two days without her direct input also helped in the respect of ‘ _Not Tinker Tech_.’ _That_ part seemed to surprise even them, and caused a _lot_ of excited discussion.  
  
By the time they got home again after four days, she was looking forward to some really neat things in the near future. Both her father and Professor Drekin had spent hours talking to quite a few people, and she’d undergone another grilling about her theories by some more scientists, who were wandering around looking slightly appalled by the time they gave up. The whole lot of them had vanished after that, leaving her to poke around in the workshop and make a list of toys she really wanted.  
  
The end result of all of this was that DARPA, and by implication several other parts of the government, were very _very_ interested in her work and made an offer that had her staring in complete disbelief at the man who casually mentioned a figure. It was so large that she thought it should have been expressed in scientific notation. Her father had nearly fallen off his chair, and the professor simply gaped for a moment, before snapping his mouth shut, swallowing a little, and thinking.  
  
And now here they were; The university had enough money to set up a whole new department entirely from scratch with a budget big enough to keep them going almost forever, and immediately set out to collect the brightest grad students and professors of several disciplines to staff it with Professor Drekin running the entire affair. The DWU got a huge injection of resources right off the bat, which ensured that everyone’s jobs were safe for good, appearing to find a whole bunch of security and background checks a price worth paying in exchange. At least no one had complained and a lot of them were looking incredibly happy. That alone made everything worthwhile in her opinion, as did seeing the look on her dad’s face.  
  
With DARPA involved, all of a sudden things started happening at a rate that she found hard to believe. Apparently when you had _all_ the money you could work miracles. They’d immediately and amazingly quickly done the conversion work on several of the old DWU facility buildings to upgrade them to working labs and manufacturing areas, helped her dad set up Gravtec and get all the paperwork properly filed so it was a fully legal and operational company, put an entire _army_ of experts on generating patent after patent and pushing them through apparently with the weight of the US government behind them, and so much more. Yes, most of the patents were covered by security restrictions that meant the general public couldn’t get access, but they were real patents.  
  
All in the name of Gravtec, without her listed on them, as DARPA seemed to want to keep her off the radar of various people. She was fine with that and she’d been assured that when the time was right she’d be known as the one who was behind the new technology. It seemed a fair deal considering all the benefits she got from it.  
  
The government even spent what must have been a horrendous amount of money fixing up all the roads in the area very quietly without drawing attention to it, blocking off buildings and side alleys, replacing wiring, and generally upgrading a large part of the docks to a level where it was far more functional and safer than it had been in decades. Her father had grumbled that it was a shame it took a miracle to pull that off, but the professor had pointed out that at least they’d _got_ that miracle, which he’d been forced to agree with.  
  
And in the end, here she was, in her own lab that she still had trouble believing was basically hers to do with what she wanted, with a couple of dozen of the brightest people she’d ever met ready and able to help her make anything she came up with, a free hand to come up with whatever she wanted, and a budget that made the Apollo mission look a little underwhelming.  
  
Glancing out the window at the prototype spacecraft she grinned to herself. At some point she was going to make the Apollo mission look like it lacked _ambition_ too…  
  
Yeah, life had taken a distinct turn for the better when she’d managed to make her subspace radio work. She hadn’t expected quite this amount of change but it had worked out well so far.  
  
There were so _many_ other things she wanted to learn, and to make. And with Gravtec to commercialize them, DARPA to fund them, and people she trusted to do all the stuff that was beyond her, she could concentrate on those things and leave the rest to people who knew what they were doing.  
  
If only school was this interesting she’d probably get better marks, but it was _boring_. Compared to what she was doing right now, it was almost _lethally_ boring.  
  
While she’d been ruminating, she’d also been carefully watching the middle monitor. It was displaying, among other things, the output of a number of instruments she’d designed and built that measured the quantum interference level around the frame reference field generators in the test area below her. This was something else that her subspace communications ideas had suggested and when she’d experimented with a prototype system to measure what she liked to think of as background noise in the quantum sea underlying reality itself, she’d found that her gravity widget did some very odd things to it.  
  
She’d pretty much expected that, and it didn’t take long to work out that this was the clue as to where the energy required to do what it did was really coming from. Clearly three C cells couldn’t provide anywhere within multiple orders of magnitude of the energy required to accelerate something the size and mass of a heavy baseball at 2 g for around 49 hours, or even most likely 49 _seconds_. Her circuitry wasn’t actually directly doing that, she’d always known that. It was more closely analogous to something along the lines of a power MOSFET; a very small amount of energy on the gate terminal could control a vastly larger amount flowing between the source and the drain with high precision. In her machine the batteries she’d used were merely powering the circuitry that was throttling a source of external energy which did all the real work.  
  
The question had always been where exactly that energy came from, or for that matter went to. She’d had a pretty good idea it was something along the lines of vacuum energy, or quantum variance across parallel timelines, which was in a sense another way of restating the same thing. Now she had proof.  
  
In theory this energy well was basically infinite, she thought. It was the next layer below normal space-time, something that some physics theories she’d read had suggested the existence of, but no one had managed to really find convincing evidence of or even a good functional description of. She was pretty close to doing exactly the second and she was already sure she was looking at the first. The signal her equipment measured whenever one of the reference frame systems was in action was very clear and tracked the operation in progress perfectly, although it was still a subtle effect that normal technology wouldn’t see at all.  
  
Moving the mouse and clicking on a couple of icons, Taylor watched the playback of the complex waveforms that her monitoring software had produced from the multiple QID units surrounding the test area, then leaned back in her chair and contemplated the screen with a small frown.  
  
She looked over her shoulder to see Brendan and Angus talking in his small side office. She hadn’t told either one of them about her subspace radio experiments yet, and wasn’t in that much of a hurry to do so. They didn’t really need to know and it was kind of her own personal thing at the moment. They had enough to deal with anyway, with Gravtec and now project Hawkflight on the horizon. Her dad knew but he hadn’t mentioned it either, for his own reasons.  
  
She’d bring it up eventually. Probably. But she wanted to explore all the other aspects of it she could see but hadn’t quite worked out the best way to achieve. That part could stay a private project. Subspace was her own playground for now.  
  
Replaying the recording again, she propped her head on one hand and very carefully scrolled through the data bit by bit, looking at the peaks from the various instrument locations and working out in her head a three dimensional map of how they intersected in real space.  
  
Eventually she saved the file to her private server and started setting up for test run thirty of the prototype spacecraft drive, while wondering exactly _why_ Armsmaster was radiating a very distinctive subspace signal from somewhere around his head.  
  
Had someone else discovered the same thing she had, or was something else going on? The interference signature wasn’t the same as her technology produced, but it was clearly related at least loosely, which was… intriguing.  
  
She decided that she’d have to build a portable detector and see what she could find with it. That wouldn’t be all that hard with the facilities she now had available.  
  
“Stand by for test run thirty. All personnel are to clear test area immediately. Gravitational shear is expected on this run. Run starts in sixty seconds from mark. Mark.” Releasing the talk switch on the console mic as a sixty second countdown started on her center screen, she cleared everything else and prepared for recording and data analysis while behind her the rest of the team got their own equipment ready. Below, several people quickly exited the test bay and one by one checked in as clear. When the last one was out and she’d verified visually that the entire zone was safe, she enabled the dead-man switch and waited for the timer to run down.  
  
Even as the test ran and the prototype calmly lifted up into the air, faint distortions around it showing where the projected reference frame intersected that of everything else, she was designing a better QID in the back of her mind.  
  
Taylor was curious, and she’d seen something that she couldn’t explain, so she was damn well going to work out what it was and _explain_ it whether it liked it or not.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Max Anders enjoyed his breakfast under the outdoor heater in the heart of Brockton Bay’s commercial district, at a small and exclusive cafe run by and for people of the right type. He, by definition, was of that type of course. While he ate a remarkably good omelet accompanied by an exceedingly good and very expensive cup of Jamaica Blue coffee, he was reading a report that had been emailed to him surrounding the odd goings-on at the Dock Workers Union. That huge ship blithely floating past at a walking pace three days ago had _obviously_ been a message, but he wasn’t sure who it was a message _to_ or who it was a message _from_.  
  
Apparently the PRT weren’t completely sure either, which upset them rather a lot. Director Piggot had, according to a couple of low level staff he’d long ago found amenable to slipping him useful information in return for a financial helping hand, spent nearly three hours shouting at Deputy Director Renick in her office that same day, apparently after he’d returned from visiting the site where the ship had ended up. The same sources said he’d looked extremely discomfited, suggesting he’d learned things that he hadn’t expected.  
  
That could be good, or it could be bad. In either case Max wanted to know more about the entire thing. The situation in the city had clearly taken a sharp deviation in an unexpected direction and that was always concerning to him, since his long term plans were predicated on knowing as much as possible about the various factions in Brockton Bay. If something critical was different he needed to find out what and decide if it helped or hindered those plans, and in either case how to turn it to his advantage. Preferably by denying it to anyone else, if possible.  
  
Annoyingly it was difficult to get inside information out of the Union. They were a very diverse bunch of bastards who were more stubborn than intelligent or they’d long since have gone somewhere else where there was actual work. He still couldn’t figure out how they stayed afloat, aside from sheer bloodymindedness and a focus on helping each other that was both impressive and very irritating. Every attempt to get a covert lever with which to pry information loose had been met with failure, although he’d come close a few times. He didn’t want to be more overt in case it alerted either that overgrown slant-eyed lizard, who while an asshole wasn’t a complete idiot, the PRT themselves, or possibly someone actually competent like the FBI. The dockworkers might be barely keeping their heads above water with a workforce that was a mere few hundred, a tiny fraction of the twenty or so thousand they’d boasted back in the glory days of the fifties and sixties, but they still had contacts absolutely everywhere and could potentially be quite the handful if prodded in the wrong manner.  
  
Now, though… He flicked a finger up his phone screen, then read the next page as he cut another piece of omelet and put it in his mouth.  
  
Something had _definitely_ happened there in the last couple of months. Rumors of lots of construction work, vehicles coming and going at all hours of the day and night, none of them visiting anywhere else in the city but heading straight to the docks from the interstate; the roads being worked on too, along with discreet but effective clearing up of the entire area… Even the various junkies and low level Merchant scum apparently either being paid to leave the place or forced to.  
  
No, something was, as the saying put it, afoot. _Someone_ was pouring money into that whole place for some reason they were being very quiet about, and he wanted to know who that was and what the reason was.  
  
His informants told him that the Chief Director herself had been calling Director Piggot quite regularly, apparently in an odd mood that was causing considerably difficulty in the local office since the Director when riled tended to bite. And it was widely known that contact with the Chief Director riled her like almost nothing else. Whatever had actually happened to culminate in the extraordinary sight of a vast rusty ship flying across the bay in one of the most spectacular demonstrations of force Max had ever seen, it was definitely causing upset among the authorities.  
  
Perhaps it _was_ time to be a little more forceful in his inquiries. A visit from someone rather more dangerous and persuasive than three or four mooks with guns might shake someone’s memory enough to find out what was going on. Brad was too obvious, he never knew when to stop, but perhaps Victor? The man was smart and smooth.  
  
He picked up his coffee and sipped it again, while he read the last page of the report, which hinted at all sorts of things but didn’t actually answer any of them. As he pressed the power button to blank the screen someone sat down next to him at the table completely unexpectedly, making him flinch very slightly and turn his head to glare at the interloper.  
  
A red-headed woman with a sharp suit and sharper features regarded him impassively from under a pair of sunglasses. “Good morning, Mr Anders,” she said calmly.  
  
“And you are?” he riposted, wondering who the fuck she was and what she wanted. Probably some drug company shill, he got a lot of them.  
  
“Here to give you some advice I suggest you carefully listen to,” she replied, her expression completely and eerily blank.  
  
“That almost sounded like you were possibly threatening me,” he said after a moment. He was getting an odd feeling about this.  
  
Her mouth, very briefly, twitched into a smile, so quickly it was gone again before he could register it properly.  
  
“That was not a threat, Mr Anders. When I threaten people, they do not mistake it for anything else.”  
  
“Who _are_ you?” he snapped, now wondering if she was connected to one of the other gangs. She didn’t give off the air of a PRT stooge although anything was possible.  
  
She leaned closer to him, almost uncomfortably close. “Who I am is not something you need to know. Who I represent _is_.”  
  
“And that is?” he asked, leaning away slightly. She was too intense for his comfort, especially from a foot away. Wondering if he was in a position that would force him to use his powers, he tensed slightly.  
  
“Part of the US government that is concerned that your organization may have designs on the Brockton Bay Dock Worker’s Union or people connected with them,” she replied quietly. “I am here to tell you that this is something you should dismiss from your mind. It doesn’t concern you, and if you persist in attempting to learn things you shouldn’t be aware of, you will not enjoy the repercussions.”  
  
He blinked. “Why would the US government believe that Medhall Pharmaceutical would be interested in the _dock worker’s union?_ ” he asked with a smile, genuinely wondering for a moment what she was talking about. “We’re a biotech research company not a shipping one.”  
  
“I was referring to your _other_ organization, Mr Anders,” she calmly remarked, her face still completely blank. “The one you are the head of, and inherited from your father after your sister met an untimely end.”  
  
Max’s blood ran cold. “What are...” he began.  
  
“We know who you are,” the woman said in a very low voice, her eyes obscured by the sunglasses but still burning into his own. “We know many, many things about you and your extracurricular activities, and those of your like-minded compatriots.” Her head moved closer to his as he listened with shock. “Certain other federal organizations who are tasked with handling the problem such groups as yours present may give a certain amount of flexibility in how this is done for reasons of their own. I can assure you that should you become a problem _my_ group is required to handle, there will be _remarkably_ little flexibility how this is done. Further attempts to in any way interfere with the dock worker’s union or anyone connected in any way with them _will_ make you that problem.”  
  
Feeling something gently prodding his stomach, he flicked his eyes down, then froze. A suppressed pistol was barely touching his suit, the design unfamiliar to him. Raising his eyes again he stared at her. “If you feel that use of your particular abilities is wise, I would suggest you look up and to your left. Third floor window, second from the right, three hundred yards west of us.”  
  
Reluctantly he turned his head in the indicated direction. A faint momentary flicker of red light caught his eye as he moved, making him look down again to see a tiny dot centered right over his heart.  
  
“You will not, directly or indirectly, attempt to interfere with the DWU or any person or organization connected to them. If you do, you will die. Nod if you understand.” The suppressor pressed every so slightly harder into his gut.  
  
Swallowing, he nodded slowly. He was all too aware that he’d never be able to form any sort of armor under or over his clothes before she could fire, never mind the sniper.  
  
“You will not mention my presence to any of your group, nor attempt to discover my identity. If you do, you will die. Nod if you understand.”  
  
Max nodded again, sweating.  
  
“If _any_ member of your organization in any way causes any form of trouble in the docks, with or without your instruction, you will be held personally responsible and you _will_ die.” She put her head right next to his. “ _Nod if you understand._ ”  
  
Once again, rather jerkily, he nodded.  
  
“Excellent. I’m pleased that we could come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement.” He absently noticed that the pressure of the gun had vanished, but was fixated on her face. “Please remember that people with special abilities, with relatively few exceptions, are still subject to the same… ballistic necessities… of the population at large. Should it be required, which I do hope it won’t be, we would have little difficulty demonstrating this fact to everyone involved. Please don’t force us to prove that. And do remember that we know where you live, we know where you work, we even know the color of your underwear. Blue, with white stripes, for today I believe.”  
  
She stood up and nodded politely to him. “It was a pleasure talking to you, Mr Anders. Allow me to cover your tab as I think your omelet has gotten cold.” She dropped a fifty dollar bill, brand new, on the table next to his plate. “With any luck we won’t meet again. If we do, something has gone wrong and we would prefer that not happen, correct?”  
  
Max nodded one last time, then watched as she walked off. After a few steps, she came back and bent down next to him. “ _That_ was a threat.” The woman smiled at him with a small flash of teeth. Moments later she’d vanished into the pedestrian traffic heading to work, like she’d never been there.  
  
When his hands stopped shaking he picked his phone up and very carefully deleted the report on it along with all related information, then sent a text to the informant who’d provided it telling him his job was done and he’d be paid that afternoon. Eventually he got up, leaving the bill where it had landed, and walked rapidly in the opposite direction to where the woman, whoever the fuck she’d been, had gone.  
  
He would swear for the rest of his life he could feel a tiny red dot on the back of his neck until he reached his car a couple of blocks away.  
  
By the time he got up to his penthouse he was quite relieved to change his blue and white striped underwear for a fresh pair.


	6. Portable Devices

Carefully placing the last tiny component onto the wet solder paste with a very fine pair of tweezers, Taylor examined the circuit board under the stereo microscope she was still highly pleased about. One of the best things about the whole DARPA and university connection was that if she needed a tool or piece of equipment, she got it with no questions asked. In the overall scheme of the total budget that was being thrown at her and Gravtec, pretty much anything she asked for was a rounding error.  
  
So she’d taken full advantage of that to equip her home workshop, which had moved down to the basement as it had outgrown her bedroom, with a smaller version of the more useful stuff in the main facility. No one had seemed bothered about it and Angus had merely smiled, saying that having the facilities to work on ideas at the moment they came to you was a good idea. Sometimes if you waited the inspiration evaporated by the time you got to work, he’d said, which was always a massive nuisance and left you peeved for days.  
  
She could see that very well. And now she had everything she needed to make almost anything she could conceive of, including a tiny little benchtop multi-axis CNC milling machine very similar to the one at the DARPA lab they’d visited, along with a small but very good vapor phase solder reflow oven, the microscope which she loved, a cutting edge machine for turning out prototype PCBs in very little time, and several other incredibly useful tools. Not to mention stocks of absolutely anything she was ever likely to need from components to wire, bar, and sheet material in at least a dozen different metals including pure gold.  
  
There was little she couldn’t build at least a prototype of, and she was very pleased about that. It hadn’t taken her all that long to learn how to use the various CAD programs needed to run all the equipment, although she was certainly aware that really becoming an expert at them would take quite a while. But it was good enough for now and opened up all manner of useful avenues of research.  
  
Very carefully, having checked that nothing was in the way, Taylor picked the assembled but not yet soldered PCB up on the carrying frame, then moved a few feet to the side and slid it into the holder on the reflow oven. Once it was secure and she’d double-checked nothing had been disturbed, she lowered it into position and closed the lid, then tapped the control to run the correct soldering profile. Watching as the indicators showed the horribly expensive synthetic liquid that was in the bottom of the tank under the board heating up, she waited while thinking about the latest alien lessons she’d been watching.  
  
Her far distant tutors were just starting to touch on some concepts she’d derived for herself from the earlier equations, the ones that led her to her ideas of subspace, but they seemed to be taking it in a slightly different direction than she had. It was something that slightly puzzled her, making her wonder if she’d accidentally done it wrong and ended up somewhere that wasn’t quite correct and only worked by a fluke, or whether she’d genuinely seen a different end point which was just as valid only not identical. Sooner or later she’d likely find out, of course, when the lesson program got that far.  
  
If she _had_ come up with a unique interpretation of the principles she was learning, it would rather please her, but it also made her wish she could tell her benefactors about it. She’d become quite fond of the aliens, who had opened up so many paths for her and through her everyone else, and at times was sad that she wasn’t able to speak to them.  
  
Yet.  
  
She did have ideas toward that goal, but it was still something that was in the early stages, and there were too many other things that seemed to take priority at the moment. In theory making the subspace receiver a subspace _transceiver_ wasn’t hugely difficult, but there were some practical concerns that needed to be addressed first, and she wanted to build an entirely new system, rather than modify her first versions. This current project, although it wasn’t directly connected to such an end result, was related in a number of ways and would help her down that path in due course. She was in no vast hurry right now.  
  
And, of course, there was the minor problem of actually being able to _understand_ them and they her if and when she managed the feat. She had a very good working knowledge of their mathematics now, of course, but then that part was likely to be much easier than learning an entirely alien language. Even so she was sure she could do it eventually.  
  
Idly reaching over the bench and prodding a button on another piece of equipment, she listened to the strange sounds of people who had evolved around another star somewhere in the universe talking. She’d had a sudden burst of insight four days ago at two AM and had immediately, though very quietly to avoid waking her father, run down to the basement and written a significant amount of code, then reworked part of her receiver, finally finishing at seven in the morning. When she’d tweaked the entire thing about a dozen times she had been excessively pleased to find that she had indeed successfully decoded the sound subcarrier that was buried in the signal she was receiving and converted it into something she could listen to.  
  
Of course she didn’t understand a word of it yet, but at least she could now hear it, and that was the first step.  
  
Turning the sound track down to a background noise that was oddly comforting, she peered into the reflow oven, seeing that the line of rising very hot vapor that was shimmering above the now-boiling liquid in the tank was nearly at the PCB on its carrier. As she watched, the wavy distortion rose above the board, immediately condensing onto it and releasing the latent heat into the relatively colder plastic and metal, then running off back into the pool at the bottom. The board heated up evenly and only seconds later the solder began to melt, all the minute parts being pulled into line by the surface tension of the molten metal in a little dance she never tired of watching.  
  
Shortly thereafter the machine beeped and started the cooldown phase. Satisfied that nothing had gone amiss, she went back to her desk and sat in front of her heavily modified former ham radio, making a few notes on the project before reaching for the tuning controls having put her headphones on. While she had only so far managed to discover one intelligible signal lurking in subspace, she was well aware that there were a lot more things out there that she could hear, and was very curious to know what they were and where they came from. So every now and then she poked around looking for something interesting and noted where it was for future study.  
  
Subspace was even more complex than the electromagnetic spectrum, of course, and Taylor knew full well that she could spend her entire life studying it and only scratch the surface, but she was a curious girl and patient too, so that didn’t seem like a bad thing to her.  
  
Carefully adjusting one of the controls, she cocked her head and listened to the weird warbling moan coming from her headphones, concentrating entirely on the sound to the exclusion of everything else. She didn’t hear the reflow unit beep again and shut down, just sat there and let the sound flow through her with her eyes shut while making tiny modifications to a dozen controls with the practiced hand of someone who knew their equipment inside out. Eventually she nodded slightly, opened her eyes, and wrote down all the settings very carefully, double checking that she hadn’t made a mistake.  
  
“I’m _sure_ that’s a video signal,” she mumbled, putting one hand on her left headphone cup and pressing it slightly. “But there’s something weird about the modulation. Might be a multiphase digital carrier, but if it is it’s _really_ low bandwidth...” She made a few more notes, tapping the pencil on her lips while she thought, then shrugged. “I’ll come back to that later.”  
  
She turned to another setup, which had her very original subspace converter attached to another radio receiver she’d modified specifically for the job and dedicated to the alien learning channel as she thought of it. .Checking the time, she ensured that it was recording properly as the next physics lesson was due in about ten minutes. She’d worked out that the originators of the transmission seemed to operate on something close to a thirty hour cycle, which might well mean that was the length of their day.  
  
She now had hundreds of hours of video recorded, including not only the physics program she’d initially found, but a number of other learning series including biology, basic math, which had helped her at the beginning to work out the differences between what she was familiar with and what they were using, chemistry, and several engineering subjects. This particular station, if that was the right term, didn’t seem to deal with things like linguistics or anything of that nature, being dedicated to harder sciences, which was mildly annoying in some ways but not at all in others. She was more interested in the harder sciences anyway.  
  
And she was sure she’d eventually locate other stations that she could learn other things from. There were an awful lot of transmissions out there after all. Luckily the one she was most interested in and could gain the most benefit from had turned out to be the easiest to get access too. It seemed likely to her that this was deliberate, since you’d want your distance learning system to be simple to use, surely?  
  
Happy that she wouldn’t miss the next bit, she got up and went back to the soldering oven, removing the now room-temperature finished PCB from it and inspecting it under the bright light over the workbench, tilting it from side to side in an effort to spot any obvious errors. Not finding anything amiss, she slipped it under the microscope, set the magnification to the right level, and spent the next twenty minutes very carefully studying every component and pad on the board for problems. Twice she had to use an extremely fine-tipped soldering iron to clear tiny shorts where solder paste had formed bridges between adjacent legs of a part, but overall it was pretty close to perfect. Finally satisfied, she pushed the head of the microscope to the side and picked up the probes of a test meter, before checking all the power supply lines for shorts or unusual resistances.  
  
She didn’t want to miss something obvious and wreck several hours work by incautiously applying power to something that would immediately convert it into smoke. That was always a pain, although everyone did it at least once.  
  
When all the pre-checks came back as correct, she nodded, then connected the board to the bench power supply, set it to the right voltage and current, and with fingers crossed just in case turned it on. The power supply display showed a short surge of current then settled down to exactly the right level, making her smile.  
  
“So far, so good,” she muttered to herself, prodding a few test points in the circuit with the probe of her oscilloscope and watching the traces change. “Waveform reconstruction is fine, subcarrier demodulation is… basically good, I think. Phase correction error output is working… yeah, that’s right. Great.” Picking up a tiny ceramic screwdriver with her other hand while holding the probe on one particular point, she very gently tuned a small and oddly-shaped inductor core she’d machined herself, watching as the widely spaced gold wire started glowing a faint blue-green color while the waveform took on the right shape on the scope screen. “And the subspace resonance deconstructor cavity is coming into alignment… fantastic… little more… little more… ack! Too far!”  
  
The remarkably deep hum that surrounded her made things on the bench rattle until she tweaked the core back just a fraction of a turn, then it stopped instantly. “Whoops. Nearly went into destructive oscillation then,” she mumbled, putting the screwdriver down and checking her readings one final time, then sitting back and smiling. “But it works. Excellent.”  
  
The small and highly complex circuit board on the bench, covered in parts almost too small to see by eye surrounding a couple of extremely complex glittering pieces of CNC machined metal, emitted a cheery glow from the middle but otherwise didn’t appear to be doing anything. She knew otherwise, though. It was busily detecting and monitoring quantum variance interference patterns in subspace, and with the correct processing hooked into it, would allow much more precise measurements of things that her current version didn’t quite handle in the way she desired. And it was much more portable than the existing systems, which was something she’d spent a considerable amount of thought on.  
  
Pleased, she turned the bench power unit off, disconnected the board, and opened one of the drawers under the workbench. Taking a box out of it she opened it to reveal a used but still functional high end smartphone, one that was sold specifically for use in marine and heavy industrial applications. It didn’t bother with the niceties of a consumer one, such as being wafer thin and all shiny, this thing was a solid matte-black rubberized device close to three quarters of an inch thick, was waterproof to at least sixty feet, could be operated with gloves on, and overall gave the impression you could beat someone to death with it then phone the cops afterwards. And from her point of view it was ideal as the battery compartment was enormous, which meant that by fitting a slightly smaller battery she could get some extra circuitry inside the case and use the phone itself as a nice little portable computer with a good screen.  
  
An hour later she’d eviscerated the phone, removing the huge battery and installing her board where it had been using the internal test connection points on the phone motherboard and some very fine wire. When it was all screwed in place and the connections potted in epoxy to stop anything breaking, she dug out a collection of lithium batteries and chose one that would fit into the remaining space, connected it as well, and screwed the back cover on again. Turning the phone on, she checked it still worked, then plugged it into her computer and transferred the application she’d been writing on and off for nearly a month over to it.  
  
It took another three hours and half a dozen bug-fixes and recompilations but in the end she got the program to do what she wanted it to. Tapping the screen she looked at the graph the app was drawing, while turning in a circle in the middle of the basement. “Hmm. That is _interesting_ ,” she said quietly, studying the map of subspace interference nodal points her new sensor board was detecting. “Range is… about seven thousand meters to that cluster, bearing… 164 degrees near enough. Which would put it right in the middle of the...”  
  
Taylor stopped dead, then very slowly moved the subspace interference detector back and forth, noting the readings shifting. After a moment she looked at the wall in the direction it was pointing, her brow furrowed, before she went back to her workbench and sat in front of the computer, the device next to her. Bringing up a mapping program, she zoomed in on her house, set it as the home position, then typed in the range and bearing her device was showing.  
  
She stared at the result with great interest.  
  
“Huh,” she commented, before picking the thing up again and repeating the scan very carefully indeed, noting every reading she got in her notebook and double checking them all. Each of them was entered into the mapping program too, the resulting image causing her to frown thoughtfully.  
  
“Now _that_ is _very_ peculiar,” she said to no-one. Only the low volume alien voices in the background replied.  
  
After some minutes, she saved her work into an encrypted partition on her drive, using a long passphrase specific to this project, cleared the cache just in case, and turned the computer off. Putting her modified phone into her pocket, the app exited and the device working now as only a phone, she went up for dinner.  
  
While thinking very hard about quite a number of things.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing we can do,” Mike said, looking around the table. “Believe me, I’ve checked. Gravtec is entirely on the up and up, they have a level of backing from DARPA and several other departments of the federal government that has to be seen to be believed, and as far as anything I can find out says they genuinely _don’t_ have anything related to Parahumans in their technology or business in general. I talked to every contact I have and they all told me the same thing. And warned me that PRT interference in Gravtec or anyone _connected_ to Gravtec, their employees, Brockton Bay University, the Dock Worker’s Union, or anyone else who could even loosely be considered involved would be met with… let’s call it significant disapproval and leave it there.”  
  
He spread his hands. “I’ve spent a solid week checking, and they’re untouchable. Even if they _did_ have a Parahuman on staff I doubt we could do anything about it, but I’m completely certain that they simply don’t. Whoever it is that invented their gravitational control technology did it without any Tinker involvement at all. It’s completely reproducible, fully understood, and from what my contacts tell me a breakthrough in a number of scientific fields that totally upends not only physics but cosmology and at least half a dozen other disciplines. And at least one of them said was guaranteed to produce a Nobel award for the genius behind it. He meant it too.”  
  
“I concur, Director,” Armsmaster said when he’d finished, causing everyone to look at him now. “I’ve acquired the relevant patents for the current Gravtec technology, which wasn’t easy as they are classified to a very high level, but my security clearance together with Professor Drekin’s aid sufficed to allow me to gain access. In conjunction with the paper he showed me during our visit, it’s very clear that all their technology is as Deputy Director Renick stated far past cutting edge but entirely understandable. It is definitely not Tinker Tech, and if anything may well open up avenues to allow Tinker Tech to eventually be understood. The ramifications of this new insight is… profound.”  
  
He shook his head in what almost looked like awe. “The mind that came up with this is beyond outstanding, I can assure you. As Professor Drekin said, a true polymath, which is vanishingly rare but does happen occasionally. I would dearly like to meet this person at some point. But we have no reason to believe they are a Parahuman, and have been assured by Professor Drekin, Doctor Calhoun from DARPA, and a number of other sources that this is definitely not the case. Unless we are to assume that all these sources are either incorrect or deliberately lying, this entire matter is out of our jurisdiction.”  
  
Emily Piggot, who had spent nearly the entire time since the ship had given her one of the worst shocks of her life by blithely floating past her office like a Macy’s balloon looking like she’d just bitten into a particularly sour lemon, glared at both of them. “You’re _completely_ certain of this?” she finally snapped.  
  
Mike looked at Armsmaster, the Tinker meeting his eyes with an expression of resignation, then looked back to her. “Yes, we are, Emily. It’s out of our hands, and if we persist in trying to make it our business, I’m fairly certain that there are people who will take exception to that. We most likely don’t want the sort of trouble they could bring.”  
  
She studied them, then peered at her own notes, flipping pages a couple of times, before picking up one of the tablets at her elbow and flicking her finger over the screen. Eventually she put it down and gently massaged her eyelids with her fingertips. “I _hate_ this city _so much_...” she growled under her breath. “Fine. If anything, that’s a goddamn relief. We have more than enough to worry about without some Tinker superscience company setting up on our patch.”  
  
“All we have is _mundane_ superscience,” Assault quipped. She opened one eye and fixed it on him, making him pale a little and shut up with alacrity.  
  
“Indeed. Which is still somewhat worrying, but at least it’s not Parahuman crap. I’ve got far more than enough of _that_ to deal with.” She took a deep breath then let it out slowly. “So I can report to the Chief Director that this is out of our hands, and if she’s so keen on finding out more, she should talk to DARPA, rather than annoying me any more. Good.” She closed her notebook and put the pen on the cover. “I just hope that none of the usual suspects get the bright idea to go help themselves to some hypertech. Somehow I can’t see that ending very happily for them.”  
  
She almost looked anticipatory at the comment. Mike shivered a little, remembering what General Calhoun had said.  
  
“I very much hope it doesn’t come to that,” he commented.  
  
“So do I, but you know this place. We’ll find out sooner or later.” There was a momentary pause, then she picked up another tablet and tapped the screen. “Next item; The Parahuman known as Circus and a missing and extremely valuable statue. One that weighed nearly four tons. Ideas?”  
  
Shortly they were involved in the normal run of the mill super-villain problems and Mike relaxed a little, hoping that Gravtec and all the weirdness in the Docks would stay well away from him.


	7. Hospital Visit

“Test run seventy four complete. Field decay as predicted. Area is safe to enter.” Angus clicked off the microphone, glanced out the window to check the status of the test zone visually, then turned to the instruments on his console. As the others in the control room moved around doing their own jobs, he scrolled back through the recorded results and jotted down notes as he checked the results against the calculated parameters. Everything lined up nearly perfectly, showing yet again that Taylor’s theories were sound. By now he’d have been startled if that wasn’t the case. The only variation shown made him frown a little, then turn to another screen and carefully inspect the results.

“Andy, we’ve got a power fluctuation on generator nine again.” He looked over his shoulder at one of his grad students, who nodded absently as he checked his own computer.

“Yeah, I see it. I thought that one was maybe a little marginal on the initial test phase, although it did pass. I think the tesseract coil former may have a microfracture which is very slightly distorting the field shape. Probably a tiny flaw in the original casting we didn’t spot. I’ll get it pulled and a new one swapped in, then have Kate check it out.”

“Good, thank you.” Angus stretched, smiling. “Other than that, everything’s working nicely. The latest modifications seem to have improved field density by nearly ten percent.”

“9.8742 percent, in fact.” Andy chuckled. “What was it that Taylor calculated it would be?”

“9.87421 percent. Exactly.” Angus grinned as he turned the chair around. “And I have little doubt that if our current instruments actually _read_ to five digits past the decimal point we’d find that missing 0.00001 percent lurking there.”

“That girl is _scary_ smart,” his student noted wisely, several of the other people present in the room nodding agreement.

“To a level I’ve never had the privilege of seeing before,” Angus smiled. “I am so very pleased that we’ve ended up working together. It’s certainly been interesting.”

“Yeah.” The younger man looked at him with a smile of his own. “A lot of people are going to end up being surprised when all this eventually becomes public knowledge. She’s almost single-handedly rewritten half of physics.” After a moment, he asked, “So when is she going to become _Doctor_ Hebert?”

“To be honest she’s already met or in fact exceeded pretty much everything required for a Ph.D thesis just in the initial phases of our research,” Angus replied, shaking his head in wonder. “We’ll have to see, though. There are some practical issues past that, but in my own view she thoroughly deserves such a qualification. Most likely in multiple disciplines. I have little doubt that in the end she’ll accumulate more degrees than all of us put together. On the other hand she doesn’t seem all that interested in such things, she’s more invested in learning.”

“About what?” Anise, one of the other grad students on his team, asked.

“Essentially _everything_ ,” Angus laughed. “She does have more curiosity about the world than anyone else I’ve ever encountered.” The rest of them grinned. “All right, get that generator replaced as soon as possible and we’ll reset for the next run this afternoon. Until then, I have a conference call with DARPA about Project Hawkflight, so I’ll be unavailable for...” He looked at his watch and thought. “Probably three hours. Try not to collapse the building into a singularity while I’m busy, if you could.”

He stood and left the room as the others smiled, hearing them get to work behind him, and thinking yet again that Taylor’s mother would have found this entire situation both highly amusing and something to be intensely proud of.

Her daughter had certainly exceeded all expectations to a remarkable degree, he mused as he walked to his office. He wondered what her next trick would be...

**=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**

Taylor looked up as her father came into her room, his face showing he was rather sad but as always at this time trying to not betray that. Unfortunately for him she was much better at reading his expression than he was at hiding it. “Ready?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” she replied, equally subdued, as she stood and put the textbook on astrophysics she’d been correcting with a pen to one side. Smoothing down her clothes, she checked in the mirror that she looked right, then walked out after him. At the bottom of the stairs she put her coat on and picked up a small backpack, then followed him to the car. Both of them got in, he started it and backed out of the driveway, then headed for a destination some miles away. Neither of them said anything while he drove, busy with their own thoughts as they were.

She looked in the side mirror and noticed some cars back a familiar vehicle, knowing it contained a pair of people who were tasked with keeping her and her father safe. No one had really talked about it but she had a good memory and despite whichever agency it was cycling through quite a number of vehicles and personnel she’d quickly memorized all of them over the last few months. There would be another one in traffic ahead of them too, she knew, and most likely at least one more in the general area pacing them from the side.

All in all she didn’t mind. They were doing their job and were very discreet, and it was a little flattering thinking that a whole secret government team was set up specifically to keep her and her dad safe. Considering the world, it wasn’t a bad thing to have backup, she thought. As long as they stayed out of the way unless something happened she was fine with it, and who knew? They might one day actually be needed. She’d much rather have them and never require the support than find out that she _did_ need them and no one was there. The thought of ending up in some horrible situation all alone gave her chills. For a number of reasons.

After an uneventful trip, they arrived and parked the car. Both got out, her father locking the doors, them coming around to her as she waited. He put his hand on her shoulder, which she covered with her own, giving him a small smile. Then they walked into the building, the receptionist recognizing them and smiling.

Five minutes later after signing in and going up three floors in the elevator, they stopped outside a door with ‘ _307_ ’ written on it. Her father looked at her. “I’ll wait in the usual place. Take as long as you need.”

“Thanks, dad,” she said gratefully. He patted her shoulder again, then walked off in the direction of the visitor’s lounge. Behind her, the elevator dinged, opening when she glanced back to reveal a man in a suit who looked at her without reaction, then headed in the other direction. Almost smiling on the inside, she took a breath, then opened the door, entering the room. Closing it softly behind herself, she sat down next to the bed, looking at the figure lying in it.

“Hi, Ems,” she said very quietly as she put her hand out and brushed some of the red hair aside from the face of the comatose girl in front of her. “How have you been?”

There was no answer, of course. There hadn’t been one since that day.

“Yeah,” she sighed after a few seconds, leaning forward and carefully and very gently hugging her oldest friend. “That’s what I thought.”

After a moment, she sat back in her chair and picked up her backpack, opening it and pulling out a book, then dropping the bag on the floor once more. “Things are going well for me and Dad, and everyone at the DWU and Gravtec. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve nearly finished the home schooling course too, although Dad was saying that maybe I should try Arcadia next year just so I don’t forget how to talk to people my own age.”

She paused, smiling a little. “I don’t know, though. I like the people I’m talking to right now, some of them are really cool. You’d like Professor Drekin, he’s really smart and has helped us enormously. Doctor Calhoun is neat too. And you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’m learning.”

Taylor glanced at the various monitors, assessing the readings. “Doesn’t look like anything’s changed. I guess that’s good _and_ bad.” She turned back to the unconscious girl. “I wish Panacea did brains,” she sighed faintly, smiling regretfully. “She’s so good with everything else, but…”

The room fell into silence only broken by the faint electronic sounds from the monitoring equipment. Eventually, she shook her head. “One day, I’m going to find those people and really do something horrible to them, trust me on that, Ems. But for now, I thought today you’d like something different,” she said, opening the book. “Mom loved this one, she used to read it to me when I was sick. It’s really old but I think you’ll like it.”

Flipping pages, she found the beginning of the text, and began, “ _At the first smile of day, when the sun was just beginning to shine on the summits of the hills, men whose custom was to live by rapine and violence ran to the top of a cliff that stretched toward that mouth of the Nile which is called Heracleot..._ “

Her quiet voice filled the room for the next two hours.

 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=  
**  
Danny paused outside the door, listening, then carefully opened it. He found his daughter sitting with a book in her lap, one hand holding one of Emma’s under the covers. She glanced up at him as he entered, smiling in a regretful way.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Same as always, Dad,” she replied. He picked up her backpack and held it open for her to put the book, an old one he remembered well from his wife’s collection of literature, into. She’d always had a slightly odd outlook on suitable bedtime stories, he reflected with sad amusement as he zipped it up and watched Taylor lean over Emma’s face, her own long curls hiding the pale form below her.

“I miss you, Ems,” he heard very faintly, then she stood, reluctantly letting go of her friend’s hand. Putting his hand on her back he guided her out of the room, taking a last glance back at his own oldest friend’s youngest daughter with the usual feeling of suppressed rage. Not showing any of it, although he suspected that Taylor knew, he walked next to her to the elevator. While they were descending he studied her face. She was clearly, and entirely reasonably, sad, but was bearing up as she always seemed to.

“One day she’ll come back,” he said softly.

“I really want to believe that, Dad,” she replied, not sounding convinced.  
“The doctors say her coma isn’t the result of major brain damage, after all,” he added. “Just some lingering affects of the attack. It could end any time.”

“Or it might never end,” the girl said with a small depressed shrug. “That’s the problem. No one knows.”

“Unfortunately true,” he was forced to agree as the doors opened. They signed out of the hospital, then headed to the car. As they got in, he looked up, then pointed. “Hey, Glory Girl and Panacea,” he said, indicating the flying figure descending to the helipad on top of the building.

Taylor glanced out the window, then pulled her phone out. He smiled as he started the car. She seemed to be quite interested in taking photos of Parahumans at the moment. If nothing else it had the benefit of raising her spirits.

“Chinese or Thai today?” he asked as he pulled out onto the main street.

His daughter, who was concentrating on her phone with a small frown, looked up at him and replied, “How about Italian?”

“Yeah, that works for me. Haven’t had a good pasta carbonara in weeks. Gino’s?”

“Sounds good, Dad,” she smiled, tapping the phone screen a couple of times and putting it in her pocket with one last glance back at the hospital and a thoughtful look on her face. This cleared after a second or two and she reached out to turn the radio on, then settled back to listen to the music as he drove.

“When you’ve finished upending physics, you could always turn your attention to biology,” he said after a couple of miles. “Give it the Hebert touch. Seems to be a fairly potent thing...”

She looked at him and snickered, then got a very thoughtful look again and went quiet.

“Oh, hell, what did I just do?” he muttered, wondering what the next oddity his daughter would come up with would be...

Oh well. He’d find out sooner or later.

**=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**

Replaying a short segment of the video, Taylor nodded slowly. “OK, that probably means ‘ _energy flux_ ’ which means that _this_ might mean ‘ _radiation._ ’ I _think_.” She made a few notes in her journal, which was slowly becoming an English to whatever the hell it was her aliens called their own language dictionary. Replaying the segment again, she listened carefully, while watching the instructor’s actions. “Yeah. Got to be ‘ _radiation_.’ Great, that helps.” She corrected one of her notes, then moved to the next segment.

After a few hours of work, she flipped back a couple of dozen pages and studied each carefully. “I’ll get it sooner or later,” she assured herself, trying to work out how to make some of the sounds required. An attempt that produced a croaking gurgle which sounded like a drunk crow set her off into helpless giggles, and made her father stick his head into the basement and inquire as to the state of her mental health. Once she had, laughing, pushed him out again, she put the self imposed language lessons to one side and transferred her attention to one of her other projects.

Picking up her modified phone she plugged a USB cable into it, then downloaded the latest recorded data to her analysis program and started work on it. A while later she sat back and studied the screen closely, one eyebrow up. “Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser as a certain famous girl would say,” she mumbled, running one fingernail down from where a specific curve intersected another one, while making calculations in her head.

“Interesting. Very, very interesting,” she added under her breath as she picked up a different notebook and flicked through it looking for the right place. Finding it, she checked the data there, then slowly nodded. “Huh. I was right. Cool.”

Making another note, she put the book down on her workbench and studied the graphs in silence for a while. Then she turned to the other screen and fired up the circuit design CAD package.

The new data sparked some ideas she needed new sensors for, and that was going to need some careful design work.

There was _Science_ to be done.

She enjoyed that.

**=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**

“The Path has become… uncertain.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

“ _You_ have no idea?”

“I know. It worries me too...”


	8. Christmas Break

Opening the door, Danny smiled at the people outside. “Hello, Angus, Brendan. Nice to see you both. Come in.” He moved to the side as his guests entered, then stamped the snow off their shoes on the mat. Once they were out of the way he closed the door, glancing out at the steadily falling snow. “Looks like we’re going to get quite a bit tonight,” he added as he turned to them.  
  
“I’ve always enjoyed a white Christmas,” Angus chuckled.  
  
“Presumably because you don’t have to shovel the driveway,” Brendan put in with a grin. “I, on the other hand, am quite pleased to no longer live somewhere where that’s a regular occurrence. I don’t miss it.”  
  
Danny laughed. “It’s not too bad, I’ve never had any troubles myself,” he said as he took their coats and hung them up. “We’re in the living room, just there on the right.”  
  
“You’re also twenty years or more younger than we old men,” Angus pointed out reasonably as he headed in that direction, the other two following. “You young whippersnapper.”  
  
“Yes, very old man of you.” Danny shook his head in amusement as the physicist smirked over his shoulder.  
  
“Hi, guys!” Taylor looked up as they all went into the living room, smiling widely. “Merry Christmas.”  
  
“And to you, Taylor,” Brendan replied, returning the smile. “How are you? I haven’t seen you for a few weeks. Designed anything new?”  
  
“Oh, lots of things,” she giggled as she stood up from where she’d been fiddling with the back of the TV, which was sitting on a low table near the closed curtains over the front window. “So many things.” She gestured to the sofa. “Sit down, I’ll get the snacks.”  
  
Danny stepped aside as his daughter zipped out of the room and vanished into the kitchen, amused at her energy. The girl was happier these last few months than she’d been since a certain black period they’d both gone through, which in turn boosted his own morale a huge amount. He sat down as did the others. Brendan looked around the room, his gaze stopping on the photos of Danny, Taylor, and Annette that lined one of the shelves on the bookcase near the TV, then moving on.  
  
“That’s an awful lot of books,” he noted, returning his attention to Danny. “I’m impressed.”  
  
Danny looked around for a moment, smiling fondly. “My wife was a voracious reader, and Taylor is if anything more so,” he replied softly. “Annette collected a pretty big library. There are more in the study, in my bedroom, in the upstairs hall, and the guest room, and Taylor’s bedroom...”  
  
The other two looked amused at his comment. “Books are essential to a well developed mind in my view, so I approve,” Angus said.  
  
“She felt the same,” Danny agreed, wishing yet again that his wife was still with them. He could see in their eyes that they knew what he was thinking and sympathized. Moments later Taylor reappeared with a tray full of bite-sized snacks which she’d spent most of the afternoon making, having decided that she wanted to do some cooking, along with a carafe of coffee and some mugs. Putting it down on the low table in the middle of the room, she looked around.  
  
“Coffee? Or I can make some tea.”  
  
“Coffee is fine for me, thanks, Taylor,” Angus commented. Brendan nodded.  
  
“Same for me.”  
  
“Sure.” She quickly poured out three mugs and handed them over, before jumping up again and vanishing for a moment, returning with a glass of coke. Pointing out what was what, she handed plates of snacks around, everyone shortly ending up with enough to keep them going for a while.  
  
“These are very good, Taylor,” Brendan observed having eaten a little savory pastry with enjoyment.  
  
“Thanks,” she smiled. “I got the recipe from one of Mom’s notebooks, it was one she used to make when I was little. It took me a few goes to get it right, but I think it worked out pretty well.” She ate one of them herself and nodded. “Might need a little more cinnamon next time.”  
  
Danny looked fondly at her as she made a note in one of the little books she carried everywhere, then put it away.  
  
Angus glanced to the side, then grinned at them both. “I like your tree.”  
  
Turning to the far corner and also looking at the same thing, Danny chuckled. Taylor looked at it proudly too. The ‘ _tree_ ’ was a construction made of delicately fabricated metal branches, all anodized different colors, with hundreds of tiny LEDs twinkling on them in a cheerful manner. The thing that really stood out, though, was that it was floating in mid air a clear two feet off the floor, suspended from the ‘ _star_ ’ on top which was a two inch wide variant of one of Taylor’s gravity generators, the device emitting a beautiful golden glow that emulated sunlight almost perfectly. He had no idea how she’d managed to get it to do that.  
  
“I thought it was a bit boring to have a plain old evergreen and why make some poor tree die in our living room just because of the time of year?” Taylor explained happily. “So I made that. Much more interesting.”  
  
“It’s… different… I’ll grant you that,” Brendan replied with a raised eyebrow and a smile. “And quite pretty, I have to admit.”  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
The doorbell rang again, Taylor jumping up once more. “I’ll get it,” she said as she dashed out of the room. Everyone watched her go.  
  
“Oh, to have the energy of the young again,” Angus snickered.  
  
“Very few of the _young_ have the energy of the Taylor,” Danny remarked wisely, sipping his coffee, which made the other two laugh. Moments later after a certain amount of muffled talking in the hallway, his daughter came back followed by Alan, Zoe, and Anne Barnes. Danny got up and went to meet them.  
  
“Glad you could make it,” he said to the new arrivals, giving Zoe a hug, then putting his arm around Anne’s shoulders for a moment. The oldest of the Barnes children, currently eighteen, smiled at him.  
  
“We wouldn’t miss coming over, Uncle Danny,” she said. “Emma… would want us to.”  
  
Her voice hitched on the last few words and he held her closer for a moment. “I know,” he replied quietly. “I know, my dear. She’ll be back, sooner or later, so don’t lose hope.”  
  
“Thanks,” the girl said very softly. Taylor grabbed her in a hug as he released her, then shook Alan’s hand, his old friend smiling gratefully with one eye on his own daughter.  
  
“How’s it going, Danny?” Alan asked as Danny waved them to seats, Taylor dragging the older girl into the kitchen after a quick whisper.  
  
“Not bad at all, Alan. You remember Angus, of course, and this is Brendan Calhoun, one of our clients.” Alan looked at the other two men, Brendan rising to shake his and Zoe’s hands.  
  
“Nice to meet you. Hello, Angus.”  
  
“Good evening, both of you,” Angus replied with a smile. “It’s been a little while since we last met.”  
  
“About… nine months or so, I think?” Zoe said as she sat, then peered at the half depleted tray. “Ooh. Are those Annette’s savory pastries?”  
  
“They are indeed,” Danny nodded. “Help yourself.” She quickly acquired one and tried it, smiling broadly.  
  
“Very good. Your work?”  
  
“I’m a reasonable cook but not that good,” he laughed as he also sat down again. “All that is entirely Taylor.”  
  
Zoe raised an eyebrow approvingly. “She’s definitely got a knack for cooking, I think,” she replied, finishing the snack. Taylor and Anne came back in just in time to hear this, the younger girl looking pleased.  
  
“Thanks, Aunt Zoe,” she said as she put another tray down, Anne doing the same with a smaller one containing more mugs, another carafe of coffee, a teapot, and some cans of soda. “Hopefully you’ll like the meal, it’s one I found in mom’s books. Apparently it’s based on a really old recipe from the middle ages, chicken and plums in sauce. It sure smells nice.”  
  
“Ah, is _that_ what that is?” Zoe sniffed a little. “I was trying to place it. I remember Annette made that, oh… ten years ago? Maybe twelve? It was very good.”  
  
Taylor looked pleased. “Hopefully mine will be as good.”  
  
Shortly everyone had drinks and snacks. Anne spent a couple of minutes admiring Taylor’s ‘ _tree_ ’ with a slightly incredulous look, which made both Danny and his daughter smile. “You are _weird_ , Taylor,” she finally said, shaking her head.  
  
The younger girl giggled. “It seems perfectly reasonable to _me_.”  
  
“It would. Because you’re _weird_.”  
  
They grinned at each other, then Taylor tossed her a controller, turning the TV on at the same time. “Sit down and lose to the master,” she ordered, pointing at the floor.  
  
“Master my ass,” the Barnes girl replied with a smirk, dropping to the floor next to Taylor. Moments later they were firing turtle shells at each other.  
  
Danny and the others watched for a while. He was pleased to see that Taylor was having fun even though she clearly missed having Emma around too. She’d always gotten on well with the older Barnes sister, although she wasn’t as close to her as she was to Emma, and after the attack they’d comforted each other a lot. It was nice to see Taylor also distracting Anne from thinking about her younger sister, which was clearly at least partly deliberate. He looked over at Zoe and Alan, both of them meeting his eyes and nodding a little.  
  
“Business going well, Danny?” Alan asked, leaning back on the sofa and putting his arm around his wife, the other hand holding his coffee.  
  
“Very well, yes,” he replied, glancing at Angus who was listening with interest. Brendan was apparently watching the girl’s game, but he knew the other man was also listening. “We’re still upgrading a lot of the DWU facilities, that’ll probably be going on for a year or so at least, but we’ve managed to reactivate nearly half the place so far. Luckily most of the buildings are fairly intact, and you wouldn’t _believe_ how much stuff we have stored away around the place. Now that the ship’s out of the mouth of the bay, we’re expecting to see quite the surge in general dock work and all the other things that go along with that.”  
  
“What are you doing with that huge ship?” Zoe asked with interest. “Surely it’s too much of a wreck to be salvageable?”  
  
“Oh, definitely, the thing’s a write off,” Danny nodded. “The engines have been under water since it was scuttled for a start, there’s so many holes in the hull it looks like a colander, and almost anything usable was ripped out over the years. We’ll cut it up as scrap to get rid of it, it’s worth a fair bit for the metal since there’s so much of it, but we moved it mostly to get it out of the way.”  
  
“And to make a certain point in a controlled manner,” Alan commented wryly, causing Brendan to look at him for a moment then go back to watching the girls.  
  
“There’s an aspect of that, I’ll admit,” Danny replied with equanimity, making Angus snort with humor. “Various parties were inevitably going to find out about Gravtec sooner or later, and doing it like that let us control the narrative more than sneaking around would have done.” He shrugged. “Or so our advisers said.” He noticed Brendan smirk very slightly out of the corner of his eye. “Seems to have worked.”  
  
“No trouble from the PRT?”  
  
“Not since that first visit,” Danny said, shaking his head. “Armsmaster was impressed and went off pretty happy, and from what Angus says he’s fascinated by our research. Director Piggot wasn’t even slightly in a good mood for a while, which is hardly unusual from what I’m told, but our information is that the local PRT finally decided that it wasn’t their problem and washed their hands of the whole thing. Which was the point, of course.”  
  
Alan nodded, smiling a little. “I wonder what the higher ups are thinking?”  
  
“No idea. Don’t really care as long as they stay out of our hair,” Danny replied with a grin. “They can handle the Parahuman problems and leave superscience to the legitimate businessmen and women.”  
  
“And scientists,” Angus put in.  
  
“Yes. And scientists.” Danny nodded. “That goes without saying.”  
  
Brendan chuckled, not looking away from the TV.  
  
“Are you going to be employing more people at the DWU, do you think?” Zoe asked with interest.  
  
Danny looked at her. “In the long run, definitely, but of course these days the security checks are the main problem,” he replied. “It’s going to take a while to get everything set up for that. But yeah, we’re certainly going to need more people sooner or later at this rate.”  
  
“Good, it’s nice to see things starting to improve,” she smiled.  
  
“Finally,” he agreed.  
  
They talked and grazed on the snacks for the next hour or so, Taylor getting up every now and then to check on the progress of the main meal she was making. Eventually she came back into the living room and said, “Dinner is to be served in the dining room in five minutes,” in a very posh accent, before disappearing again. He could hear Anne laughing from the kitchen.  
  
Looking around the room, he said with a small smile, “I think in that case we should adjourn to the dining room. We don’t want to make the chef angry.”  
  
“That would most likely not end well,” Brendan agreed with a nod, standing up and recovering his coffee mug from the floor, which he put in the tray on the way past. A few minutes later all of them were in the next room, which didn’t get used much these days, the old dining table pulled out to full size with the extra section fitted in the middle. All the places had been set earlier, so they seated themselves just as Taylor and Anne came in bearing dishes of food.  
  
Very soon they were eating what turned out to be a remarkably good meal, and talking happily. Danny looked around at his guests and his daughter, feeling that while he wished certain things about life now were different, he couldn’t really complain about how things had turned out.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“Merry Christmas, Taylor,” Zoe said, handing her a small wrapped package. Taylor accepted it with a smile.  
  
“Thanks, Aunt Zoe,” she replied. “Here, I got this one for you.” She gave the older woman a slightly larger package with iridescent wrapping paper, which she’d taken a liking to when she found it in the shop. It reminded her of a diffraction grating, which of course it essentially was, and the play of colors as you moved it around was fascinating.  
  
“Very pretty, dear,” Zoe said after examining it. “Thank you.”  
  
“Don’t open it until Christmas,” Taylor added, causing Zoe to smile and nod.  
  
“Of course I won’t. But that’s only two days, so I think I can manage to hold my curiosity until then.”  
  
They shared a giggle. “Your father seems happier than I’ve seen him for quite a while,” Zoe said after a few seconds, looking around to where Taylor’s dad was talking to Brendan and Alan, with Anne in the background explaining something about the video game they’d been playing earlier to Angus. “For that matter, so do you.”  
  
Taylor smiled gently, nodding. “I think we are, Aunt Zoe,” she replied quietly. “It was bad for some time. But...” She sighed deeply. “Mom wouldn’t have wanted us to mope around. It’s hard not to sometimes, I admit. Getting Gravtec going, though, and the stuff happening with the DWU and all that… it’s really helped with Dad, he’s got something he can actually _do_ to help now. And he’s loving it. Me too, I’ve got all the toys and people want me to make things, which is a lot of fun.”  
  
Zoe glanced at the floating tree-like construct, then met Taylor’s eyes. She looked both proud and highly amused. “I can see that,” she said with a giggle. “You really are remarkable, Taylor.”  
  
Taylor buffed her fingernails on her shirt then examined them with a supercilious expression. “I am, yes.” They both broke down laughing after a second or two. “Thanks. I really am having fun though.”  
  
“Annette would have been very pleased about that,” Zoe told her. “She always wanted the best for both of you. I’m so glad it’s working out.” She looked at the tree-thing again. “Although I have no idea _how..._ ”  
  
“It’s **SCIENCE!** ” Taylor said, thrusting her arm skywards and putting the other one on her hip.  
  
Anne looked at her, then Angus, before nearly falling over laughing. Taylor grinned.  
  
Zoe simply shook her head.  
  
“Changing the subject, are you going to Arcadia, did you decide?” she asked curiously.  
  
Taylor dropped to the sofa from where she’d jumped up, then pulled her knee up and put both hands on it. “Yeah. The home schooling thing is great, I’ve done about three years worth this year, since it’s a lot easier when people aren’t bothering me, but Dad thinks I need ‘ _socialization_ ’ or something like that. Silly, I know, I’m nice and social already, but I need to keep him happy.” She grinned as her father looked at her with a raised eyebrow, waved at him, and laughed when he sighed and went back to discussing something with the others. Who seemed to find this funny too.  
  
Zoe was giggling once more. “You’re a very friendly girl, Taylor, I’m sure you’ll get on fine.”  
  
“I hope so,” she admitted, a little nervously and dropping the act. “I think I dodged a bullet not going to Winslow, after… well, after. I’ve heard some weird things about it. But Arcadia is supposed to be pretty good, and after all my work they agreed to jump me up a year. I’m not sure if that’s good or not. I’ll be doing something that’s closer to what I’m up to, yeah, but I’ll also be the youngest person in the class, probably. So...” She chewed her lip for a moment, then shrugged. “I can’t honestly say I’m not a little worried, but Dad might have a point. I hardly see anyone my own age at the moment.”  
  
The older woman patted her knee. “You’ll do fine, dear. You’re a friendly and happy girl, and ferociously smart. I’ve got no doubt you’ll succeed at anything you want to. Just look around!” She waved at the floating construction in the corner. “You’re doing some amazing things. And even if you can’t tell most people about that, it’s going to end up helping all sorts of things, I’m sure about that.”  
  
“I guess so,” Taylor nodded. “It’s a little annoying that I _can’t_ tell anyone who doesn’t have clearance, but I understand why, and I even agree with it. But it’s going to make things a little awkward.”  
  
“I doubt you’ll have any trouble making some new friends even so, Taylor,” Zoe remarked with a small smile. “After all, everyone has their own secrets.”  
  
Taylor looked at the tree, then back at Zoe, her lips twitching. “Admittedly _most_ people’s secrets aren’t a matter of national security,” the older woman allowed with a snicker.  
  
“Yeah. Oh well. We’ll see after Christmas, I guess.”  
  
They shared a smile, then Zoe went over to join the conversation around the coffee table, while Taylor pulled out a notebook and started sketching a preliminary design for a hand-held MRI scanner that she’d been thinking about for a few weeks now. Every now and then she looked around at her dad and friends, feeling that she was definitely in a good place.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“Who’s that?”  
  
Vicky looked at her friend Jackie, then in the direction the other girl indicated. A somewhat younger girl, probably about a year their junior although pretty tall for her age, with lustrous curly black hair halfway down her back, was standing in the line at the serving area in the cafeteria. She looked vaguely familiar but Vicky couldn’t place her immediately.  
  
“Not sure,” she replied, trying to think where she’d seen the girl. She nudged Amy with her elbow, causing her sister to mutter something rude under her breath as she nearly dropped the book she was reading. “Hey, Ames, any idea who the new girl is?”  
  
Amy looked over, then shook her head, stopping halfway through the gesture. “Oh… hang on, didn’t I see her… Right. I remember. Saw her at the hospital a couple of times, I think. Dunno who she is though, other than a friend of one of the long term coma patients there.”  
  
“That girl who got mugged?” Vicky asked, suddenly remembering one case about a year back that she’d rushed her sister in to deal with. It had been pretty fucking nasty, she recalled, Amy having come out looking furious and sad at the same time.  
  
“Yeah.” She knew she wasn’t going to get anything more about it and didn’t bother asking. Her sister took medical privacy seriously.  
  
One of Vicky’s other friends came over, having noticed the direction they were all looking. “New transfer in,” Melissa, a short blonde, said as she stopped next to their table. “Taylor Hebert, she’s in Mandy’s home room. She was home schooling for the last year, after her mother got killed, I hear. Traffic accident. She’s crazy smart from what Mandy said. Get this, she did _three years_ worth of schooling in one year. They bumped her up a year, she’s not even sixteen yet.”  
  
“Holy crap. Really? Three years all by herself?” Vicky stared at her friend as did the others, horrified. “Doesn’t the poor girl go out? She must have spent every minute slaving over a book!”  
  
Melissa shrugged. “No idea. But Mandy said she was nice, friendly you know? Oh, yeah, she also said we’ve got a new science teacher, and there are a couple of new people in the administration. Seems to be a lot of new staff around these days.”  
  
“I don’t care about new teachers, I want to know about new students,” Vicky laughed. “You know me, I’m curious.”  
  
“You’re pushy, you mean,” Amy grumbled, going back to her book. “Leave the poor girl alone.”  
  
“She’s coming this way!”  
  
Everyone, including Amy, looked. Sure enough, the new girl was wandering in their direction, apparently looking for a free seat.  
  
Vicky shoved Jackie along the table. “Move over,” she said.  
  
“Hey!”  
  
“I want to meet the new girl. She looks interesting.”  
  
“Oh, fine.” Sighing, her friend slid her chair sideways, while Melissa helpfully grabbed one from the table behind them and spun it around. As the tall brunette approached, Vicky waved.  
  
“Hey, want a seat?” she called.  
  
The other girl paused and looked at her, then at the others. One hand was holding her tray and the other her phone. After a glance at the screen, she prodded the thing with her thumb and put it in her pocket, then smiled at them. “Sure. Thanks.” Sliding her tray onto the table she sat down. “Hi. I’m Taylor.”  
  
“Vicky, this is Amy, my sister, this is Jackie, and this is Melissa,” Vicky quickly said. “So you’re new here, I guess?”  
  
“Yeah.” Taylor nodded as she picked up a fork. “Just started today. It seems like a nice place so far.”  
  
She looked around, pausing for a moment on a table a couple of rows away at which Vicky’s on and off boyfriend Dean was talking intently to a couple of other boys, Carlos and Dennis, about something or other. Right now Vicky wasn’t talking to him, and he knew exactly why. Taylor’s eyes moved on, then she smiled at Vicky. “It’ll be interesting to see what I learn here.”  
  
“You like learning?” Vicky asked curiously.  
  
“Oh, yeah, I’m interested in all _sorts_ of things,” Taylor replied earnestly. Her pocket made a ping sound, making her mutter something under her breath and pull the phone out, quickly check it, then put it away. “Sorry, left an app running.”  
  
“That’s a pretty big phone,” Jackie commented.  
  
“It’s an unusual model, but I like the battery life,” Taylor smiled as she started eating her mac and cheese. “Lasts nearly a week.”  
  
“It looks like it’d break your foot if you dropped it,” Amy remarked with a small grin, looking up from her book. Taylor laughed.  
  
“It pretty much bounces.” She glanced at Dean’s table for a moment, then went back to eating. Vicky looked over as well, seeing the boy was now gesticulating vigorously, apparently acting out some football play or something, and sighed faintly.  
  
“So what hobbies do you have?” she asked.  
  
Taylor looked at her for a moment.  
  
“I like electronics,” she said thoughtfully. “And reading. And learning things like I said.” She smiled faintly. “I’ve been doing a lot of distance learning this last year.”  
  
“That’s… nice.” Vicky shook her head in despair. “We need to get you interested in _normal_ things.”  
  
“We do?” Amy looked up again, then at Taylor, who seemed amused. “For god’s sake, Vicky, she’s been here about ten minutes. Give her a chance!”  
  
Jackie started laughing, while Vicky smiled. “I told you, I like meeting new people. Taylor’s new. So there we go.”  
  
Her sister merely sighed and shook her head.  
  
Turning back to the new girl, Vicky leaned in. “OK. Here’s some of the _important_ things you need to know about Arcadia...”  
  
Taylor listened with interest as the girls took turns, even Amy after a while, explaining the various aspects of life in the best school in Brockton Bay.


	9. Dusty Boxes

“Hmm.”  
  
Taylor looked at her phone with one eyebrow up a little, then past it to where Vicky Dallon was floating about ten centimeters off the floor, arguing with her boyfriend yet again. It was a fairly good-natured argument but it was still an argument, something the pair seemed to engage in far more than seemed sensible.  
  
She’d seen it happen at least four times in the last week, since the start of her time in Arcadia. Which she was quite enjoying. Her father had been right, it was nice to meet other people her own age, even if many of them seemed to be a little slow on the uptake at times. Most of them were still friendly and she liked them.  
  
Already she’d made several friends, she felt. Vicky, definitely, was one of those, as the girl was impossible not to like even though she had something of a reputation too. She was remarkably outgoing, generally seemed pretty honest and enthusiastic, and was a mine of information on Parahumans, which explained why she was studying the subject. Her sister, too, was interesting. Very sarcastic and generally far quieter than Vicky, which admittedly was the case for most people, but definitely very intelligent. They shared a love of reading which had, when it had come up, seemed to make the brunette Dallon sister open up quite a bit.  
  
Taylor rather suspected that Amy wasn’t entirely happy with life, and lacked friends. She was prepared to help with both cases.  
  
Vicky’s boyfriend Dean was a slightly odd guy. He’d been introduced to Taylor a couple of days ago, when they’d made up yet again, and had shaken her hand readily enough but had also given her a somewhat strange look for reasons she wasn’t entirely certain about. Aside from that he seemed nice enough, and was certainly very polite. His friends Dennis and Carlos were amusing, Dennis particularly, although he sometimes tried too hard. According to Vicky he had a reputation of his own, and was rather more familiar with detention than ideal…  
  
She hadn’t yet been introduced to Chris, the other guy who hung around with the first three on a regular basis, but she’d seen him around.  
  
Glancing at her phone again, she tapped the screen a couple of times, saving the readings for later analysis, then put it away as the bell rang.  
  
Another positive of attending Arcadia had been all the data she was getting on Parahumans, of course.  
  
It somewhat amused her that she’d ended up almost instantly meeting most of the ones who went to the same school. At the insistence of one of the more obvious members of that group.  
  
She wondered if Vicky knew that Dean and his friends were the Wards? Presumably yes, as it wasn’t difficult to work out even if you didn’t have a subspace quantum interference detector handy. They weren’t exactly being as sneaky about it as they probably thought they were. Considering the number of people Taylor had met who _were_ as sneaky as they thought they were, she’d had quite a lot of practice working this sort of thing out, but even without that she was a little surprised that no one else seemed to know. Or perhaps they did, and were merely discreet about it? Who knew? She was aware that Parahumans were pretty picky about who they let know their real identities to, for very good reasons from what she’d learned when she studied the situation, and she could hardly begrudge them the same sort of thing that the government was going to great lengths to arrange in her own case.  
  
And she had no intention at all of mentioning to anyone else what she was working out, unless it became completely necessary. People deserved their privacy.  
  
But she was gathering some _really_ intriguing data here. Data that she needed close proximity to fully acquire and analyze. Data that pointed towards some fascinating possibilities.  
  
She liked data like that. Mind you, she liked data in general. Learning things was fun.  
  
As the teacher came in everyone settled down, although he had to look hard at Vicky to make her stop floating around and land. The blonde girl smiled at him, the man sighed very faintly, then everyone got their textbooks out and opened them.  
  
“All right,” he said after he’d checked everyone was present and nothing was amiss. “Who can tell me what mitochondrial DNA is?”  
  
Half a dozen people’s hands shot up, Taylor’s among them. She was finding biology rather interesting, and had some intriguing ideas percolating in the back of her head already.  
  
She made a mental note to ask Amy some questions at some point, as it seemed likely that the girl might well shed light on a few things she was wondering about.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“Taylor? You in here?”  
  
“Over here, Dad,” Taylor called as she looked around from where she was half-way up a tall row of steel shelving that was entirely covered in boxes, most of them dusty and obviously untouched for years. The rolling ladder she was using was tall enough to reach all the way to the ceiling, but moving it around the larger stuff on the floor had been something of a pain in the ass. She’d ended up having to enlist the aid of a couple of the dock workers to help, which they’d done efficiently and without any issues. Now she was leaning over one of the boxes which she’d opened, rummaging around inside the random items filling it to the brim.  
  
“What on earth are you doing up there?” he asked when he’d negotiated his way through the rows of shelving. This store room was so full of stuff it was reminiscent of the last scene from _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ , she thought with a smile. He stopped at the bottom of the ladder and looked up at her with interest.  
  
“I needed some more C63020 nickel aluminum bronze bar for machining a part from, and we’re out of it in the Gravtec stock,” she explained, holding up a thirty centimeter piece of three centimeter diameter somewhat greenish-gold metal. “Dan said he thought there was some left over from making bearing bushes a few years back, but he couldn’t remember exactly which box it was in.” She waved at the shelving next to her. “Aside from it being somewhere in this section. So I thought I’d poke around and see if I could find it.”  
  
“Clearly you succeeded,” he said with a smile.  
  
“Yeah. Found about fifty kilos of it, that’s more than enough. We’ve got more on order but it won’t be here for a couple of days because that alloy is a little unusual, and I wanted to make this thing today.” She shrugged with a grin. “Worth wasting an hour or so looking for, especially when it _wasn’t_ a waste.” Putting the bar down on the steps with a clunk, next to three more just like it, she turned back to the box.  
  
“So why are you still here?” he asked, ascending the steps until he could look into the box himself, as she pulled out a lump of oily machinery and tried to work out what it was.  
  
“Got curious about all this stuff,” she mumbled, turning the thing over in her hand, then deciding it was some sort of diesel injection pump by the looks of it. She put it to one side as not worth bothering with and delved deeper.  
  
He chuckled, putting his hand on her back affectionately. “I always said you should be a customs inspector, the way you basically inventory everything you get your hands on,” he said with a grin. She glanced at him and smiled, before returning to what she was doing. It was more or less true, ever since she’d been a little kid she’d tended to poke around in cupboards and storage areas and make mental lists of what was there. Her mother had more than once, having misplaced something, simply asked her where it was and she’d been able to think for a moment then tell her.  
  
“Alternator from a truck,” she muttered, putting the next item down. “Broken milling cutter, pity, it’s a nice one, stainless steel bolt, um… barrel from a machine gun, I think?” She held up the metal tube questioningly. He took it from her and peered at it.  
  
“AK-47 barrel, probably from one of the guns the ABB is always losing around the Docks,” he said after a moment, handing it back. “They’re very slapdash with their weapons. We’ve broken up a lot of them for parts over the years, or just to make sure they don’t get used again.”  
  
“Huh. OK.” The barrel went next to the box as she kept digging. “Ooh! Some tubes… couple of thyratrons, nice ones, that’s an old radar klystron, and some brand new heliax connectors! Cool. I’m having _those_.” She put her loot next to the bronze bars with a satisfied smile.  
  
Her father chuckled again. “You have more resources available to you than God himself but you’re looking through piles of scrap?”  
  
She giggled. “Well, yeah, but some of this old stuff is neat, and why waste it?” Moving a couple of ancient and rusty gear wheels the size of her hand to the side, she kept looking. “And you never know if you’ll find something really int...”  
  
Taylor paused, then stuck her hand right down to the bottom of the box, grabbing something that had caught her eye as she moved her head a little and the light from behind her glinted off it. After a moment’s tugging, and a bit of help from her father holding the box in place, she yanked whatever it was into the open from under all the other stuff.  
  
“...eresting,” she finished slowly, examining her find with great care. “What the _hell_ is this thing?”  
  
Turning it over, she peered at the widget closely. “This isn’t commercial stuff,” she added thoughtfully. “It’s hand made.”  
  
The device was a lump of electronics with some custom made mechanical parts sticking out one end, the entire thing about the size of a hard drive. It showed signs of having suffered from an uncontrolled thermal release, or as a non-engineer called it, a fire. There were scorch marks up one side, although when she experimentally rubbed them with her thumb, it became apparent that the damage was superficial and external, not from the thing itself having burned out. A bundle of wiring sticking out the side had been crudely cut, probably with a hacksaw, and one of the mounting lugs was snapped off too.  
  
Overall on first appearance it looked similar to a vehicle ECU, but she could see that while the casing had probably come from such a thing, and the wiring was using the standard color codes car manufacturers used, all of this had been repurposed for another use. It reminded her of her own first prototypes although she was fairly sure hers were neater. The holes that had been drilled in the box weren’t lined up very well, for example, which was just sloppy.  
  
“Let’s have a look,” her father said, sitting on the next step down. She handed it to him, then went back to poking around in the box to see if there was anything else like that in there.  
  
“Hmm. I _think_ this might just be a bit of one of Squealer’s horrible mashups,” he finally said, just as she pulled out another vaguely similar device that was in a similar state, although from a quick inspection probably did something different. She froze, then slowly turned her head.  
  
“That’s real Tinker tech?” she asked in amazement.  
  
“I think so, yes. About… maybe three years back? Just after Squealer turned up and the Merchants were starting to become a problem rather than just a nuisance, they went up against the ABB for some reason I never worked out. Got the crap kicked out of them. Squealer and Skidmark barely escaped with their lives and about ten of the ordinary Merchants didn’t manage that. Several ABB died too, and there were close to fifty casualties among the bystanders, the cops, and the PRT when they finally turned up.” He shrugged with a sigh. “Usual thing, I’m afraid. Anyway, they had two of those bizarre vehicles she makes, really ugly stuff that shouldn’t work in the first place but somehow does. One of them was blown up by the ABB with a rocket launcher, the other one was what they escaped in, but Lung set it on fire on the way out. They dumped it in the bay about ten minutes later, just past Pat’s bar.”  
  
“Huh.” Taylor nodded, absorbing the information. She hadn’t known about that particular event but then she’d only been about twelve or so at the time.  
  
“The PRT salvaged a couple of things from it, like the obvious weapons, but they left most of it in the water,” he continued. “It was getting in the way of the wharf down there, so some of the guys ended up taking our crane barge over and fishing it out, then cut it up for scrap. PRT didn’t seem interested, the Merchants weren’t going to come and ask for it back, so we ended up with the whole thing. No use to anyone, it was a mess, half burned and mostly soaked in salt water.” He held up the module in his hand. “I vaguely recall that the back part of the thing wasn’t too badly damaged and we pulled out some bits and pieces like this that someone must have thought were worth keeping. No idea why, Tinker Tech has a very short shelf life after all, and can’t be fixed. And we don’t even know what it does anyway.”  
  
“Cool.” Examining the unit she had in her own hand, Taylor pulled a small flashlight out of her pocket and shone it into one of the connector holes in the side. She could see the innards were somewhat sooty but looked mostly intact. And… wrong. “ _Very_ cool. More data,” she mumbled, tilting it around for a moment or two.  
  
“Sorry, I missed that,” he said quizzically.  
  
“I said it was interesting, Dad,” she replied more loudly, turning the light off and putting it back in her pocket, then smiling at him. “I think I want to have a look at these things. I’m curious, I’ve never seen a real Tinker device before.”  
  
“Try not to kill us all,” he said after a moment’s reflection, handing her the other one. She stacked both of them next to her bronze rods, grinned at him, then went back to poking through the box of interesting crap.  
  
“I would never do _that_ , Dad,” she giggled.  
  
“The roof would beg to differ,” he commented with a grin, making her look over her shoulder at him and roll her eyes a little. Standing, he descended the stairs. “Lock up when you’re done. I need to go talk to Angus, so I’ll see you later.”  
  
“Later, Dad!” she called, waving without looking. She heard footsteps fade into the distance as she kept investigating what else might be in there.  
  
When she finally stopped, three boxes later, covered in dust and oil, but with a wide smile, she had two more chunks of currently unidentifiable hardware clearly made by the same person, another even larger klystron, and a whole pile of semi-rigid copper RF interlinks with SMA connectors on the end, which she thought might come in handy at some point. Putting all the stuff she’d removed and discarded back where it came from took half an hour, and it was another ten minutes work to find an empty box for her haul. By the time she left the storeroom and locked it behind her, nodding to the security man posing as a dockworker and believing she didn’t know who and what he was, she was very contented with the results of her work.  
  
And she was _very_ intrigued to find out what sort of machine a Tinker actually produced.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Angus walked over to where Taylor was working at her computer, the young girl entirely surrounded by large monitors filled with windows showing multiple graphs, streaming columns of numbers, and at least half a dozen command terminals. She was rapidly typing into one of the latter, then inspecting the resulting output with concentration. As he watched, she nodded to herself, muttering under her breath as he’d noticed she tended to do when working, made a few cryptic notes on one of her pads at her elbow, then turned to one of the other monitors. “What are you working on?” he asked curiously, making her look up at him then quickly smile. “That doesn’t look like the gravity generator hardware.”  
  
He peered at the complex schematic that was on one of the monitors with interest.  
  
“Nope, it’s something else,” she said, going back to the screens and clicking a few controls, before leaning back and stretching. On the other side of the room one of the big color printers whirred into life, slowly extruding a huge sheet of paper covered in diagrams, while next to it a smaller one began spitting out pages of more normal paper. He could see even from here that they were dense with mathematical equations. “We’re going to need a chemical engineer and a materials scientist.”  
  
She got up and went over to the printer as he followed, wondering what she’d done this time. Picking up the sheaf of paperwork that had already printed, she flipped through it, extracted half a dozen sheets, and handed them to him. “To make this,” she added as he accepted them and started reading.  
  
After about three pages, he raised his eyes and met her amused gaze with incredulity. “A room temperature superconductor?”  
  
“Yep. Should work, I think. As far as I can work out it’s not that hard to make, but I’m still working on theoretical chemistry so we need someone who knows their stuff.”  
  
“Good lord.” He went back to the papers, scanning them carefully. Chemistry wasn’t his field but at this level it was as much physics anyway, and he understood _that_. The equations for electron Cooper pair formation were obvious, although she seemed to have extended a lot of the quantum theory surrounding valence bond resonance in an unexpected direction. He recognized some aspects of her revised theory of gravitics involved in the math, which was intriguing.  
  
“It’s a type two superconductor, and the vortex glass phase temperature should be around eight hundred and sixty kelvin,” she explained, gathering up the rest of the printout as the printer spun down into silence, then tapping the stack into a neat pile. “Which is far better than any of the existing ones like the cuprate-perovskites. And it won’t suffer from some of the major downsides to that sort of stuff either, it should be a ductile material about the hardness of aluminum, not a brittle ceramic, for example. And I think it’ll be quite cheap to make.”  
  
He shook his head in wonder, handing her the paperwork, which she put back into the pile, before running the entire thing through the binding machine. She gave him the still-warm document. “Probably a couple more patents in there, right?” she grinned.  
  
Angus sighed a little, putting his free hand on her shoulder and saying, “You, my dear girl, are an unending source of delight, but keeping up with you is… difficult.”  
  
Taylor laughed, smiling at him with amusement, then moved to the bigger printer as he flipped through the main document, which was a full description of the theory behind the material she’d apparently invented wholesale, along with a suggested high level process for making it. The details were left to someone with knowledge of this sort of chemical engineering, which he agreed would take an expert. Fortunately he knew several, all of whom would happily mortgage their families for a chance to work on something like this.  
  
“You did mention superconductors that first time, but I’d forgotten about it,” he commented as he looked over her shoulder as she held up the large printout, which was a full schematic of a very complex piece of electronics. “I assume you need it for this, whatever it is?”  
  
“Yes. It’s a hand-held MRI scanner,” she replied, holding the sheet very close to her face and checking one of the details, then nodding. He stared at her.  
  
“A _hand-held_ MRI?” he echoed, feeling the familiar sensation of not quite knowing how they’d arrived where they were without any intervening steps.  
  
“Yep. It’s much higher resolution than the normal type, if I did it right, and will do both normal MRI and fMRI too. We should be able to adapt some commercial tomography software to work with it which will save time writing it all from scratch.” She rolled the diagram up and turned to him, holding it in one hand and tapping it on the other. “I can probably make it smaller with the second generation but I wanted to make a prototype and test it before that. I’ve designed the main electronics, all I need now is the superconductor so I can wind the main field coils. By the time we have that I’ll have the PCBs made and built, and some basic test software worked out.”  
  
“You _do_ realize that this little project of yours is enough to spin off an entirely separate company on the back of, I hope?” he asked with a shake of his head. She shrugged a little with a smile.  
  
“I guess. But there’s nothing stopping Gravtec branching out, right? We can make gravitational frame regenerators and MRI scanners too. And all the other things I’m thinking about...”  
  
“Well, we’ll certainly not run out of things to do in the short term,” he finally said, accompanying her back to her desk.  
  
“Yeah. I wanted to get the easy stuff out of the way before I start working on the _really_ cool things,” she giggled, making him sigh again. Mostly because he was certain she actually _meant_ it.  
  
“Completely changing the subject, how is school treating you?” he asked, sitting on the edge of her desk.  
  
“It’s fun,” she replied after thinking it over for a moment. “I’ve met some interesting people, made a few friends so far, found some other things to learn about… I like it. It’s sure better than junior high was. That was _so boring!_ ”  
  
He snorted with laughter. “Considering that you probably knew more about mathematics, physics, and several other fields than your teachers, I’m not entirely surprised you’d feel that way.”  
  
The girl nodded with a sigh. “They kept wanting me to go over the same stuff, and told me to stop reading ahead. Which is ridiculous. The books were so simple it was silly, and there were quite a few errors in them too! But they got annoyed when I corrected them and shouted at me.” She folded her arms and glowered at the keyboard. “They should be using _correct_ textbooks, not ones that make basic errors.”  
  
Angus looked fondly at her. He could just imagine a twelve year old version of her carefully fixing the errors in a physics text with a pen, then getting upset when the teacher complained.  
  
“Well, at least that part of your life is in the past,” he said calmly. “You have the rest of it in front of you, and you seem to be making the most of it.”  
  
She brightened up as she dismissed previous indignities. “Yep. And it’s a lot of fun. Dad’s enjoying it too.”  
  
“I think we all are.” As he was about to say something else, his phone rang, so he pulled it out of his pocket and looked at it. “Ah. Brendan. I’d better take this.”  
  
“OK. See you later,” she replied, smiling.  
  
“I’ll find a suitable group to work on this as well,” he said, holding up the document. “I have several people in mind already.”  
  
“Great.” She waved as he walked off and by the time he was at his office she was deeply involved in yet another project. Closing the door, he sat down behind his own desk and tapped the answer icon.  
  
“Hello, Brendan. Say, is DARPA interested in a room temperature superconductor that will cost about as much to make as stainless steel?”  
  
He listened to the response with a broad grin.  
  
When the other man finally shut up, he said, “Indeed. Our friend has certainly exceeded expectations yet again. I’m almost dreading to see what happens next.”  
  
Looking at the document in front of him, he slowly turned pages as they talked, mentally building a list of what would be needed for yet another research group.  
  
At this rate they should probably rename Brockton Bay University to the Taylor Hebert Research Institute and be done with it, he mused, smiling a little to himself.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Having finished her homework, Taylor closed the books and looked at the clock. “Half an hour. I can live with that,” she said to herself. Stacking everything neatly to the side, she got up, left her bedroom, and went downstairs. Her father was washing the dishes after dinner so she picked up a cloth and started drying the ones in the rack, getting a murmured thanks as she did. Between them they soon had the task finished. Afterwards, he got himself some coffee, tousled her hair on the way past causing her to squawk indignantly, laughed slightly, and went into the living room to watch the news.  
  
Somewhat amused she grabbed a couple of cans of soda out of the fridge then went down into her lab, turning the lights on as she descended the stairs, then walking over to the workbench. Popping the tab on the first can she sipped it as she examined the four chunks of mystery Tinker hardware sitting there.  
  
Eventually she pulled the chair out, sat down, put the open can and the new one to the side, and reached for a screwdriver. She turned on the high resolution camera above the bench, made sure it was pointed at her work area, then began disassembling the first device very slowly and carefully, making notes as she went and dictating her actions too.  
  
Three and a half hours later she was staring at the guts of the devices in bemusement.  
  
“That’s just _wrong_ ,” she finally said in exasperation. “Who the hell designed this junk? It’s a miracle it ever worked in the first place!” Shaking her head, she pulled the microscope head into place and slid one of the exposed circuits under the lens. “Right, then. Let’s see… OK, _that’s_ never going to work for long, it’s entirely the wrong power rating. And this BJT is nowhere _near_ the current required to drive _that_ coil properly. Which seems to have been wound in the dark by a drunk one-armed monkey...”  
  
Taylor sighed heavily, pulled one of the large format notebooks closer, picked up a fine pen, and began sketching out the circuit while puzzling over places where the designer seemed to have somewhat ineptly improvised a very inefficient method to do something the hardest way possible. She was wondering the entire time if all Tinkers just made it up as they went along, or whether Squealer was somehow a bit special in that respect.  
  
Late that night, she finally yawned and sat back, rubbing her eyes. The sound of her alien tutors was a comforting background noise over the sound of the fans in the computers. Waving a little smoke away from where she’d unsoldered one of the components to examine how Squealer seemed to have modified it with a tiny add-on circuit connected to three of the pins she picked up the nearest soda can with her other hand, shook it slightly, then sighed as it was empty.  
  
“Well, I can say with confidence that I don’t think she actually understood what she was doing,” she remarked out loud to the alien soundtrack, which didn’t pay any attention. “Because I can see what this is doing and it’s really not doing it very well at all. The phase space interactor can’t be more than about three percent efficient if that. And this is the crudest version of something that’s almost but not quite a tesseract coil I can imagine having the faintest possibility of working in the first place. I’m surprised it didn’t melt down the first time it was turned on.”  
  
Picking up what was left of the device, which she’d determined after some time was meant to be an optical diversion field generator, or what PHO termed a cloaking device, she shook her head in wonder. “Cool idea, _horrible_ implementation,” she added with a sigh, before putting it down again and looking at many pages of notes she’d made as she worked out what it was and how it worked. And the more pages of how it _should_ have worked.  
  
Deciding that designing her own, properly made, version could wait, she got up, dropped all the cans into the recycling bin under the desk, then headed upstairs to bed, flipping the lights off on the way.  
  
It was late and tomorrow was a school day after all.  
  
“Tinkers,” she grumbled as she went into her bedroom and closed the door.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“The Prime Asset has done it again, sir.”  
  
“Good news, definitely. Is it likely to be as disruptive as the gravity devices?”  
  
“At least. The ramifications are significant in a large number of fields. The railgun project will benefit from it immediately, but there are a huge array of possible areas that will also see massive changes.”  
  
“Incredible. And gratifying.”  
  
“Quite. I take it that there will be no problems with additional funding?”  
  
“None. Everyone is agreed that this project, and the Prime Asset, are worth anything required.”  
  
“That’s good to hear. On another note, has there been any more trouble from the expected directions?”  
  
“We’ve had to intervene more often than I’d like, annoyingly. Certain parties are… less than entirely helpful in this case. It’s possible that more pressure will have to be exerted. But that’s our problem, you don’t need to worry about it at the moment. Just keep doing what you’re doing and we’ll see how it pans out.”  
  
“And if there is… direct interference?”  
  
“Deal with it.”  
  
“I look forward to it, Sir.”  
  
“I don’t, because it’s going to be a nightmare to clean up after if it happens, but that’s how it goes.”  
  
“As you say. I’ll report again in three days as usual, unless the situation changes.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“You’re welcome.”


	10. Top Secret

The silence in the dark-paneled room was broken by the sound of pages turning. After a number of such noises half a minute apart, the turner of the pages closed the file and looked around at the others gathered around the oval table, stopping on the one at the far end who was sitting watching her as were the rest of them. His face was set in a practiced and professionally blank non-expression. Behind him on the wall were a number of official decorations while off to the side a US flag dangled from a ceremonial stand.  
  
“The PRT would very much like to meet the Tinker behind these breakthroughs,” the woman said in a calm firm voice. “As there is clearly no way that this is _not_ the work of either a very high level Tinker, or a Tinker/Thinker combination, based on our own experts. As such it falls within our jurisdiction and frankly we’re… somewhat curious… as to why DARPA has been given oversight.”  
  
The man smiled a little, without any humor, while several of the others present stirred slightly. He shook his head. “No, Chief Director, I’m afraid that you do not have the clearance required to learn any more that what’s in that folder.”  
  
“I have top secret clearance, sir.”  
  
“You have top secret clearance, yes. You do _not_ have the _correct_ top secret clearance needed for this project. It is restricted to a very small number of need to know personnel, which does not include anyone associated with the PRT, I’m afraid.”  
  
“Secretary Robinson, our remit _as you know_ covers _all_ Parahuman activities in the United States, and the last I checked, Brockton Bay was indeed still in this country.” Rebecca Costa-Brown looked hard at the man. He held up a hand as she was about to add to that.  
  
“Correct, but irrelevant. As you can clearly see from the documents, tests were very thoroughly carried out on the relevant people and there is no doubt whatsoever that they are not in any way a Parahuman. Not by your own definition, nor any other accepted one. What they _are_ is gifted with a level of intelligence that comes once in a millennium combined with an imagination and ability to innovate that is quite possibly unique. The combination has already led to some remarkable inventions, a complete upheaval in several fields including physics, and will certainly produce multiple Nobel prizes in due course. And, of course, it has opened a pathway towards a technological revolution that makes the invention of the printing press and steam engine look rather half-hearted.”  
  
He smiled a little once more. “The long term ramifications are… beyond easy calculation at this point. But the _short_ term ones are already paying dividends in a big way. At least fifty projects from the last six decades that were shelved due to lack of specific requirements have suddenly become viable, and we expect many more such things to happen. Gravtec and associated groups are _vital_ to the scientific, technological, and military ability of this country, and I don’t think I’m being too excessive to say vital to the world as a whole. And the one thing we do _not_ require is interference from outside sources.”  
  
The Secretary of Defense leaned forward a little. “Not even one as… reputable… as the Parahuman Response Team. As admirable as your people are, we don’t need your specific expertise in this matter as it simply doesn’t include Parahuman abilities.”  
  
Settling back, he added with a somewhat larger smile, “Should that change in future, of course, we would then read you in on the situation as required. But for now, there’s no Parahuman activity for you to involve yourself with, or to distract you and your agency from their own important tasks.”  
  
Costa-Brown slapped her hand on the closed folder. “Our people as you put it are certain, even from the limited information you’ve seen fit to share with us, that these breakthroughs are literally decades, possibly centuries, past any state of the art known. It seems highly implausible that one person, or small group, could advance that far that quickly _without_ any form of Parahuman input,” she replied, somewhat annoyed.  
  
“We _do_ know that there are a number of Tinkers who have successfully, and repeatably in most cases, built functional anti gravity systems. We also know that there are at least two Tinkers who can duplicate certain other Tinker technology, and in some cases derive aspects of the underlying principles. Admittedly not to the point that something this complex could be understood, but we feel that with the right combination of Parahuman abilities such a thing is possible.”  
  
Shaking her head, she went on, “Much _more_ possible than normal scientists, however talented and intelligent, leapfrogging current understanding in… almost _everything…_ to arrive at theories a century in advance of anyone else. Therefore, the balance of opinion is that it has to involve Parahumans, despite what you’re claiming, and as such we need to be involved. For a number of reasons which I won’t bother going over yet again.”  
  
He indicated the folder with one hand. “You’ve read that. Everything you are cleared to know is in it, and as I’ve explained, it clearly shows that Parahuman abilities are _not_ involved. DARPA is very good, you realize, and they were _extremely_ thorough in their tests.”  
  
She almost snorted. “This tells me nothing about the actual person, all data has been anonymized, and I’ve got no idea even how old your alleged genius is. Or even if it’s one person or a group.”  
  
“I know. That’s rather the point.” He looked mildly amused.  
  
Both of them stared at each other for a while, no one else interrupting although the small audience seemed interested in what would happen next.  
  
“I find this entire situation both highly irregular and more than a little irritating,” Costa-Brown finally commented with something of a glare. “And I’m certain that you’re hiding things that we should be involved in.”  
  
“I can’t help that, Chief Director,” the man replied evenly. “You are free to feel that way. The fact remains that by direct order of the President, advised by the Chiefs of Staff, this matter is not something that concerns the PRT and isn’t likely to become such, at least in the short term. I’ve told you all I am allowed to, that’ll have to do.”  
  
She opened her mouth, but he spoke again before she could get a word in. “Don’t push too hard on this, Chief Director. You won’t win. And we both know that you have far more work that you can handle even now _without_ involving your agency in things that do not fall under your remit.”  
  
Letting out an annoyed albeit faint sigh, she closed her mouth, glared at him, looked around to see everyone else watching her, then shook her head. “This has been singularly unhelpful,” she remarked acidly. Standing, she adjusted her clothing, then picked up the folder and looked at it, before dropping it back onto the table. “And I have to say I feel that you’re making a mistake.”  
  
He shrugged very slightly. “We disagree, and even if that were to be the case, it still wouldn’t be relevant to the PRT. Thanks for your time.”  
  
Costa-Brown examined him closely, then turned away. Heading towards the door, she commented, “This isn’t over, Secretary Robinson.” Once the guard had let her out and it had closed behind her, the Secretary rubbed his brow in a tired manner.  
  
“I really hope it is, Chief Director,” he muttered. “It’s getting ridiculous.”  
  
“You realize that the PRT is going to look for other ways to get more information,” one of the high ranking military men at the table said seriously. Robinson glanced at him and nodded with an expression of weariness.  
  
“Probably. They’ve had their own way for far too long and think they can do pretty much anything they want,” he sighed. “We should have done something about that years ago, but...”  
  
“They’re _really_ not going to like some of the things that come out of The Project,” someone else, this one an elderly but very fit looking gray-haired woman, said with a small smirk.  
  
“No, I suspect they won’t,” Robinson agreed, now looking mildly amused for a moment. “Time will tell how that works out.” He looked back at the first man. “Anything to worry about from Gravtec, or relating to the Prime Asset?”  
  
“No, at the moment things are going fairly smoothly,” the four star general replied. “Kaiser has been warned off, and appears to have taken the warning in the way it was intended. We’ve got most of the required assets in place to deal with any of the other local threats and suitable interventions are being designed for the more serious ones. The PRT ENE is more than happy to stay well out of things, despite what the Chief Director might wish. Director Piggot is not a fan of hers, and is well aware that she’s got more than enough on her plate as it is without actively looking for new problems. The Prime Asset has settled well into new schooling and appears to be making friends. Interestingly two of the New Wave people are among those.”  
  
Robinson raised an eyebrow. “Really? Hmm. Is that likely to be a problem?”  
  
“Not at the moment. So far they mostly seem to be in contact at school. It’s possible that at some point it may be necessary to take steps if the Prime Asset desires further outside contact, but we’ve run background checks on all her associates and related personnel and nothing has been flagged as particularly worrisome at this point. We can contain most scenarios with the assets in place even now, and within a month or so we’ll have everything in place to deal with virtually any problem one way or the other.”  
  
“I see. Excellent, please continue the good work. If all this continues to produce results like we’ve already seen, it could well solve a vast number of our current problems in ways we never even considered possible.”  
  
“The international fallout of even the gravity technology is going to be… significant,” someone else pointed out. “And it’s inevitable that it’ll get out sooner or later. There are already a lot of rumors and chatter concerning the events in Brockton Bay as it is. No matter what we do we can’t contain knowledge of the technology indefinitely.”  
  
“Agreed, but that was never the plan to begin with,” Robinson replied. “We need to make sure we have a significant lead and keep it, though. And to ensure that our allies are kept happy. But that’s not your job, we’ve got other people handling that side of it. You keep the Prime Asset safe along with everyone else involved with The Project, no matter what it takes.” He picked up his pen and the small notebook he’d jotted a few things in during the last meeting, putting them into his inside jacket pocket, then stood. “Budget is literally irrelevant. If you can avoid going to war with China that would be ideal, and if you can’t at least try to give me enough notice to let the President know before the shooting starts.” He smiled grimly as they chuckled, then left the room, the others following in ones and twos.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“All generators online at nominal output.”  
  
“Field geometry configuration set?”  
  
“Yes, the program is running. No errors shown.”  
  
Taylor nodded, pleased, checked the graphs on her console, then looked to the side at the monitor showing the view from a number of cameras in the test area. “Blast shields in place,” she said into the microphone in front of her, “Area clear of all personnel. Load test article one.”  
  
There was a burst of activity from around the room, several other people working on their own stations. Off to one side her father, Angus, and Brendan watched the larger screen that was mounted on the wall.  
  
“Test article loaded.”  
  
“Set acceleration field to ten percent.”  
  
“Acceleration set.”  
  
“Confirm field geometry stable?”  
  
“Confirmed.”  
  
“Interlocks disabled. Recorders…” She double checked her instruments, as did a couple of the others. “...active. Firing in three… two… one!”  
  
She pressed the pair of buttons on the console in front of her, both of them with protective covers flipped up out of the way, one forefinger on each. The immediate result was a resounding bang that made the entire control room vibrate gently.  
  
“Shot complete. Download and correlate all data, reset for test two.” Even as she let go of the mic button she was watching the graphs change on half a dozen screens, nodding to herself. A hand on her shoulder made her look up and to the side to see her father smiling at her.  
  
“That was quite loud,” he commented. She grinned.  
  
“Yeah, cool sound, wasn’t it?”  
  
Pointing at one graph, as Brendan and Angus came over and stood behind her, watching with interest, she said, “The projectile left the accelerator at nine hundred and forty meters per second, then impacted on the shear field two milliseconds later. The power shunt worked as designed, there was almost no residual kinetic energy left. Most of the noise was the sonic boom.”  
  
“Very impressive indeed, Taylor,” Doctor Calhoun said with a smile of his own. “Another of your ideas appears to be valid.”  
  
“The full scale rail gun would be interesting to try but I’m pretty sure the result will be the same,” she replied as she leaned forward, pushing her glasses up her nose and examining the results. “And like I said, it’s an inefficient way to make something go really quickly anyway.”  
  
“It’s still something we would like to finish, which your superconductor should allow,” he pointed out. “The first batch of the new material does match your predicted properties but the yield is still very low. The chemical engineering team is convinced they can optimize that with another couple of months of work though.”  
  
“Rail erosion is going to be the big problem,” she said absently, working out some multidimensional equations in her head then typing the results into a number of fields in the control software as she did. “I’ve got a few ideas on how to fix that but I’ll have to think about it some more...”  
  
The three men exchanged glances, then Danny patted her shoulder with a fond look.  
  
“You are a terrifying young lady,” Angus commented quietly with a look of amusement. She glanced up at him, grinned quickly, then went back to her work. A minute later she pulled the microphone closer and prodded the talk switch. “I’ve tweaked the field geometry which should reduce post-impact instability by eleven point one four three percent, approximately. We’ll finish processing the data from the first shot, ETA...” Taylor checked the progress of the computer for a moment. “…five minutes, before the second test. Area remains hazardous until further notice.”  
  
Releasing the button she leaned back, pulled a can of soda out of the under-desk build in fridge, and popped it open, then picked up a pen as she took a sip. “Until then I’ll work on my Spanish homework,” she said more casually, flipping a textbook open with the end of the pen. Her father chuckled, shaking his head, then he and the others went off to Angus’s office to discuss business.  
  
Behind them, Taylor put the can down and started writing, humming a tune she’d heard on the radio under her breath. All around her a dozen or so technicians and scientists did their jobs competently and well.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Stomping into her office, Rebecca slammed the door hard enough to make one of the pictures on the wall slip to a strange angle, then stood in the middle of the room clenching her fists. “I _really_ do not like that man,” she growled. “ _Politics_...”  
  
Shaking her head she got her momentary lapse of calm under control, then moved to adjust the picture until it was straight. Satisfied, she sat behind her desk and stared at the scene, one of a rather beautiful sunset over a world that was almost uninhabited by humans, until she felt able to think sensibly about everything.  
  
It was immensely frustrating dealing with people like Secretary Robinson for a number of reasons. Not least was that she didn’t like feeling that people knew things she didn’t, which was clearly true in this case. Especially people like him.  
  
And there were a _lot_ of things about this whole situation which were puzzling, worrying, and annoying. Not to mention had implications that went far beyond anything the Secretary was aware of. He only had to deal with one country on one world, _she_ had to deal with everyone everywhere. Which was made more difficult by people who kept vital information from her.  
  
Something _very_ strange was going on in Brockton Bay, she was certain of that. And it was having effects, _somehow,_ that stretched far beyond that benighted city. Those effects were… problematic.  
  
She didn’t _like_ problematic effects. There were far too many other things going on to have someone throw a monkey wrench into the mix, accidentally or more worryingly on purpose. _Especially_ on purpose.  
  
Sitting there, she thought hard for a while. Even her own abilities hadn’t really shown her anything useful during this most recent meeting, or any of the others she’d attended in the last few months while trying to pry information from the hands of a Pentagon that seemed to have become virtually impossible to penetrate. All she got for the most part was that they were taking security more seriously than in war time, and being very effective at it too. There was evidence that the small number of people who knew the details of what was going on were very excited, but at the same time they were going to extreme effort to avoid anyone else finding out _anything_. Much more successfully than seemed plausible. It was likely that more than one Thinker was helping them with that but she wasn’t sure who was involved, aside from it almost certainly not being anyone connected to the PRT or Protectorate.  
  
Which was also annoying.  
  
The out of nowhere breakthroughs in physics and a few related fields that had resulted in apparently entirely repeatable and predictable gravity control were so far past anything current theories allowed for that she couldn’t see any way they could _not_ be the result of Parahuman work. It seemed very likely that someone, somehow, had managed to reverse engineer a Tinker design, or less likely had triggered as a Tinker who could actually _explain_ their invention. Either case created a whole series of possible benefits for Cauldron’s work, but only if she could find out what they _were_.  
  
There was also the not so minor problem that somehow this whole situation was causing Contessa of all people trouble with her Path. The woman was completely confused by this, and had found no way so far to compensate for it. That again suggested a powerful Tinker/Thinker was at work, as virtually nothing other than Zion himself, the Endbringers, or Eidolon was capable of blocking her ability.  
  
It was worrying, and created an ever growing number of questions to which she had no answers.  
  
Had someone figured out a method to block precognition efficiently enough to interfere with the most powerful such ability known?  
  
Was it, possibly, somehow related to the Endbringers? _That_ was a terrifying thought…  
  
How did all these things tie together? What was behind it?  
  
Shaking her head Rebecca sighed. She couldn’t think of any way to find out the answers without more information, and acquiring that information would either need a lot of careful work, or some rather direct actions that would be hard to conceal well enough to avoid repercussions she didn’t really want to have to deal with.  
  
Emily Piggot had given her nothing useful, and was less and less pleasant each time she tried. Not to mention as uncooperative as she could possibly arrange without _quite_ crossing the line into insubordination. None of her usual sources could tell her anything either, no matter what angle she tried. And none of the others seemed any more successful in finding out the truth.  
  
Brockton Bay had become a complete information black hole, which implied someone was putting a vast amount of effort into arranging this. And most likely had some Parahuman talent she herself would very much like to acquire.  
  
“Damn it,” she muttered, tapping one finger on the desk irritably. Going there herself probably wouldn’t achieve anything if dozens of video calls hadn’t done so. Sending someone else to see if they could lever some useful information out of anyone in the city was a possibility, although a low probability one, admittedly. It would need to be someone who could deal with people in a manner that gained their trust and didn’t raise flags. Someone persuasive and calm.  
  
So not David.  
  
Eventually she sighed, then got up and called for a portal to Paul’s office, walking through it as soon as it appeared.  
  
Hopefully Legend could dig up something helpful without making waves.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Carefully soldering the last fine wire onto the PCB, Taylor peered through the microscope and checked that everything was in order and there were no shorts or dry joints. Finally satisfied, she put the tiny soldering iron back in the stand and stretched, leaning back from her workbench.  
  
Drinking some water, she pushed the microscope head to the side to get it out of the way, then studied the small multilayer PCB sitting on the clamps on the bench. It was only a couple of centimeters on a side, and was the result of several evenings of careful work. Putting the glass down and picking up her notebook, the one entitled ‘Tinker Hardware Investigations Volume 1: Squealer’ she flipped it open and perused her own neat writing for a little while, making completely sure that she hadn’t missed anything.  
  
Of course if she _had_ it would be extremely annoying as she’d have to scrap hours of work, but after she’d reached the end of the section covering this particular design, she was happy it was all in order. Closing the book she dropped it on the bench to one side, then leaned over and retrieved the large printout of the schematic for the device in front of her. Unrolling it she shuffled the chair sideways to a clear spot on the bench, put it down and weighted the corners with random tools, then bent over it once more.  
  
“OK,” she mumbled, her voice barely audible over the background audio track from the alien tutors which she paid no conscious attention to, although if she did she could make out a few words here and there. “Dimensional recirculator is good. Quantum selection circuit should be fine, and a hell of a lot more efficient than that garbage she came up with. And my version of a phase space interactor will actually _interact with phase space_ without bursting into flames. How difficult is that? Piece of junk Tinker crap...”  
  
Shaking her head, she circled a couple of minor nomenclature errors on the circuit diagram and noted beside them the corrections needed, not finding anything that would actually cause any issues. Quickly scribbling down an idea she had of making the whole design a little more efficient for version two as it came to her, she nodded in satisfaction.  
  
“Great. Everything checks out. Lets see if it works properly.”  
  
Moving back to directly in front of the circuit, she connected the short control and power pigtail to the relevant port on her computer, and the three different bench power supplies she was using for this first test. Carefully setting all the voltages and current limits to the right levels, she turned them on, then hit the control to apply power to the circuit.  
  
Several displays changed quickly, settling down to the predicted and correct values. She glanced at the display at her elbow which was showing an image from the thermal camera mounted above the board, watching as it displayed the heat from various tiny components coming to life. A faint whine came and went as the main phase space converter ran through resonance into stable operation.  
  
“Huh. Not bad at all,” she said to herself with a nod. “Running a little warm but I can fix that...” She made a delicate adjustment with a very small tool to the innards of the board, watching the thermal display, which showed one of the primary drive circuits cool slightly. “Better. Good, that’s working to spec. So all I need to do now is flash the firmware and we’re ready to see what happens.” Smiling a little, she prodded the keyboard a few times, moved the mouse, and clicked on an icon. Typing a filename into the correct field she waited for the program to compile the source code, then clicked the next icon. A progress bar zipped across the screen for a couple of seconds then the computer chimed success.  
  
“Done. So all I do is reset it, and...”  
  
She prodded a pair of contacts that were on one edge of the board with a small pair of tweezers, then blinked.  
  
“Huh.”  
  
Cautiously feeling the bench, she moved her hands around until she could feel the main power switch, and poked it. The odd visual distortion effect that had just happened, happened again, and she could suddenly see her bench once more.  
  
“Shit, that worked better than I thought it would,” she grinned, feeling very pleased. A large part of the middle of the bench had abruptly vanished from sight, leaving only an image of the back wall of the basement and the floor. “Got the field size a little wrong though...”  
  
It took a few more tests and some careful fiddling but in the end she got it doing what she wanted it to. Highly satisfied she disconnected the board having recorded all the power draw values, then dug around for another surplus industrial cellphone in her drawer. Pulling out a suitable candidate she spent half an hour gutting the battery compartment, installing her new board, and adding a somewhat smaller battery. When it was all closed up and the control software loaded, she picked it up and moved to the center of the room. Standing in front of the camera she’d aimed at that point, Taylor made sure she could see the image from it on one of the monitors, then raised the phone and ran the app. Adjusting the parameters to the right values, she prodded the start icon and watched with amusement as her image promptly disappeared from the screen.  
  
All that was left was an apparently empty room.  
  
“Cool as shit,” she giggled to herself. She tapped the icon once more. “Now you see me...” Another tap. “Now you don’t. Brilliant, it works even better than I thought it would.”  
  
Having played with it for a while, she turned the cloaking device off and went back to her chair. Putting it down she swung the chair from side to side thinking while looking at the thing.  
  
Eventually she put it to one side to charge and turned to her computer. That was a successful project, but she still had the other widgets to redesign properly.  
  
It was turning out to be a lot of fun, figuring out how a Tinker had screwed up a perfectly sensible design and fixing it. She was learning some interesting things in the process, and was wondering whether she could lay hands on more Tinker Tech...  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
The portal closed behind him as Legend flew towards Brockton Bay from well past the low level radar detection range. Moving fairly slowly so he had time to think how he was going to approach this problem, he aimed towards the PRT building. Director Piggot was probably going to be difficult, she pretty much always was, but with luck he’d be able to find out a few things that he agreed with Rebecca appeared to be somewhat strange. He wasn’t as convinced as she appeared to be it was something urgent, but it _was_ odd, definitely. That much had been apparent ever since that ship had gently floated up the bay like it weighed nothing, a feat that had made the news immediately and caused him to gape in shock.  
  
He’d been wondering ever since how it had been done and who did it. On the other hand, it was Brockton Bay, and weird shit was pretty much par for the course in this place. He was well aware of that, as was anyone who paid more than cursory attention to the most Parahuman-infested city on a per capita basis possibly anywhere.  
  
It was his job to keep an eye on such places, after all, even if only casually. And it wasn’t all that far from New York.  
  
Probably, thinking about it, not far _enough…_  
  
Smiling a little to himself at the thought, he flew onwards while rehearsing in his head what he’d tell Director Piggot about this unexpected visit from one of the Triumvirate. She was going to be sarcastic, he was pretty sure of _that_ , but hopefully would also be reasonably cooperative. Or at worst not actively hostile.  
  
He’d soon find out anyway.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
An alert beeped causing Taylor to look up from watching the latest Alien Teaching TV episode, then hit the pause key. Getting up she walked over to her latest subspace interference detection system, which she’d extended and rebuilt several times, now having more range and lot more discrimination. She studied the display with interest. A map of the city, extending out to nearly forty miles past the boundary and well into both the sea and the rest of the state, was centered on her house, and showed lots of little icons, many of which were moving around. Various colors denoted a number of things she’d worked out.  
  
And there was a new one heading directly towards the center of the city from a location some distance off the shore. She watched as it moved closer, then eventually stopped near the bay in a location that matched the PRT building. Clicking on it with the mouse she typed a few words into the field that opened up and saved the result, then ran another program to look at the log.  
  
“That’s… _really_ interesting,” she mumbled, examining the odd subspace interference surrounding the location the new icon had suddenly appeared at. “Really interesting indeed.”  
  
After a moment, she switched back to the main display then went back to her main computer and brought up a couple of programs she’d written to analyze the logs from the detector in different ways. Shortly she was deeply involved in thinking with portals.  
  
“There’s _science_ to be done...” she almost sang under her breath, thoroughly enjoying herself.


	11. Backchannel Inquiries

Emily sighed heavily with a shake of her head. Getting up, she walked over to the window and beckoned to her unwanted visitor, who looked quizzical but also stood and joined her there. She pointed.  
  
“You see those lights there about four miles away?”  
  
Legend nodded. “I do.”  
  
“If you want more answers, that’s the only place you’re going to get them,” she said. “But I doubt you _will_ get them. Renick spent nearly a month trying to pry more data out of Gravtec, and didn’t find _anything_ except what they _want_ us to find. DARPA have the entire place locked down tighter than anything I’ve ever seen before, and are clearly working with various intelligence agencies to _keep_ it that way. General Calhoun paid a visit a few days ago and made it perfectly clear that they were here to stay, it wasn’t anything the PRT needed to be involved in, and further poking was only going to end up causing problems for everyone.”  
  
She looked at him. “I’ve got way more than enough problems _already_. I don’t need more, and I _especially_ don’t need more coming from our own government. I’m not going to put myself between DARPA, the DIA, the NSA, and whoever the hell else it is that’s doing fuck knows what over there, and the Protectorate and the Chief Director. I’m satisfied, based on Renick and Armsmaster’s investigations and testimony, along with other information from various sources, that there is no Parahuman behind the Gravtec inventions. So the PRT has no reason to get involved. I’ve already told Costa-Brown that several times. She’s got a lot more high level contacts in the Defense Department than I do so I don’t know why she keeps pushing. _I’m_ certainly not going to be able to tell her anything new.”  
  
“What makes you think that my visit is because of the Chief Director?” he asked mildly. “I’m looking into this on behalf of the Protectorate.”  
  
Folding her arms, she glared at him. “ _Sure_ you are. We both know that the only reason you’re here is that Costa-Brown got told no by someone who could make it stick and she hates that. The woman is a control freak and that’s me being polite because she’s my superior. She _loathes_ not knowing things and once she gets an idea that the PRT should be doing something, she won’t drop it.”  
  
He looked a little amused. “That’s… possibly not the ideal thing to say, in your position?”  
  
“Am I wrong?” she demanded. After a moment he sighed faintly and shook his head. “And do I really look like I actually _care_ what she thinks of me?” He shook his head again, smiling a little. “This job is going to kill me and that’s if things go _well_ ,” she grumbled, turning back to peering at the distant DWU facility, bright lights far away shining out across the dark water of the bay and outlining a considerably larger area of activity than had been the case in recent history. More and more of the formerly moribund docks seemed to be coming to life, old facilities being reactivated and pressed back into service.  
  
The old cargo ship was already half-scrapped, even from here the light of cutting torches sparkling across the hull as cranes moved around above it, their own aircraft warning lights easily visible. The union seemed to be working around the clock at the moment, and just in the last week she’d seen two large barges, that had been fixtures of the scene for as long as she’d been posted here, move slowly past to the ship graveyard then return carrying smaller vessels that had been lifted onto them. The dock workers seemed to be quietly and efficiently clearing out the wreckage that had blighted the bay for so long and she knew from various sources that the city government was absolutely ecstatic about the whole thing.  
  
Whatever else was going on, the DWU was gaining political capital by the bucketful, which promised to produce some strange alterations to the administrative landscape in the future.  
  
“Of course, this is Brockton Bay,” she went on after a moment of reflection, in a somewhat sour voice. “Things _never_ go well here. If they _do_ it’s only because the universe is setting you up for something horrible...”  
  
“A somewhat pessimistic viewpoint,” he commented, glancing at her, then following her gaze again.  
  
She shrugged. “I’d call it realistic rather than pessimistic,” she replied. “I’ve been here for too long to be optimistic about pretty much anything. We have literal Nazi supervillains wandering around the place slaughtering innocent people just because of their skin color, a rage dragon who can take on the entire local Protectorate team at the same time, beat them like a drum, and make it look _easy_ , the largest Parahuman-backed gang of drug dealers on the east coast, the most effective Parahuman-backed mercenary team for a thousand miles, and nothing even remotely close to the resources or manpower to do more than hold the status quo as long as none of those guys decides to _really_ cause trouble.”  
  
He grunted a little, still looking out the window, in a somewhat reflective manner.  
  
“That’s not including all the random smaller groups of troublemakers, of course,” Emily growled. “Über and his idiotic friend are the least of those. There are more than half a dozen minor but extremely irritating villains who pop up and cause trouble, diverting far more attention to stopping that sort of crap than I like, we’ve got New Wave lurking around in the background always ready to turn a minor drama into a crisis… Hell, Glory Girl all on her own can do _that_ without even _trying_.”  
  
Legend made a sound that was nearly, but not quite, a laugh.  
  
“They _are_ heroes,” he pointed out in good humor. She scowled.  
  
“Allegedly. _You_ don’t have to clean up after them,” she muttered, making him chuckle once more. “And on top of all that we also have entirely pedestrian crime mixed in, which keeps everyone on edge, makes the BBPD have to work for a living, and confuses the issue because you never know when a random burglary will actually turn out to be Parahuman related after all. Which it is more often than I like. If I had twice the number of troops and Parahumans of my own and three times the budget I’d _still_ be outnumbered and outgunned.” She looked up at him again. “So to be brutally honest I’m perfectly happy to have someone else dealing with the Dock Worker’s Union and all the insanity that can and has come from that direction in the past. It’s not my problem and as long as they can keep it that way I don’t care _what_ they’re doing.”  
  
“Rebecca is of a different opinion,” he remarked thoughtfully, pondering the sight in the distance.  
  
Emily shrugged again. “She can have any opinion she wants. Me, I’m going to stay well back from whatever DARPA are up to, wish them well, and get on with the things I’m meant to be doing.” He looked a little worried, causing her to point again.   
  
“Look, I can tell you from here that _someone_ is putting a hell of a lot of money into that place,” she said after a few seconds. “It’s nearly twice the size it was six months ago, the roads are being fixed all through the docks, all the vagrants in the area aren’t there any more, crime in that whole part of the city, Parahuman or otherwise, has fallen off a cliff… I don’t precisely know who is doing what, but whatever it is that they’re doing it _works._ And the more they do it the easier our own job becomes. I’m not going to look too deeply into things that I’m not cleared to know, I’ve got enough on my plate without going asking for more. The city is fine with the whole thing, the university is practically giggling with joy because of whatever Gravtec really is, and the public is slowly realizing that things are starting to improve and likes it that way.”  
  
She inspected the far-off sparks coming from the crew steadily rendering the old ship into scrap, then went back to her desk and sat down with relief. “So all in all I’m just going to pretend that part of the city doesn’t exist and get on with my life,” she finished.  
  
Legend kept looking out at the night scene. “Surely you’re curious about what’s going on over there? Why DARPA picked Brockton Bay of all places to apparently set up a top secret research center? It’s a very strange place to do that, considering we’re not all that far from at least one other site of theirs.” He turned his back to the window to look at her, as she watched. “And while Brockton Bay University is highly regarded in a number of fields, it’s not been considered a groundbreaking institute in physics as far as I can find out. Yet now it has an entire department dedicated to gravitational physics research? That’s… somewhat odd.”  
  
Emily nodded. “Of _course_ I’m curious. Anyone would be. But I’m not curious _enough_ to want to risk getting Calhoun and his people pissed with my command. He says it’s not Parahuman tech, Armsmaster agrees, Renick’s own inquiries also agree, so as far as I’m concerned and until such time as something changes in that respect, I have no reason to officially question that. I know a losing battle when I see it, trust me.”  
  
She sighed as she reached for a bottle of water and unscrewed the lid, then poured some into a mug. Taking a swig from it, she put the mug back on her desk. “I can only assume they know what they’re doing and there’s a good reason for setting up here. I’d guess that the person, or persons, behind their breakthrough, is probably local and quite likely based in BBU. But I’m not going to go looking for them. DARPA says it’s their business and I’m minded to leave it to them.” She scowled a little. “I spent way too much time trying to figure it out until we were sure it wasn’t under our jurisdiction, and to be frank it’s a relief to have something weird happening around here that we _don’t_ have to deal with.”  
  
“I’d think it would be more of a relief not to have anything weird happening at all,” he said in an amused tone as he came back and sat down. She gave him a hard look as he smiled.  
  
“Yeah. You do _realize_ where you are, right? No chance of there not being _something_ weird going on. Weird is what this damn city _does_.”  
  
He started laughing as she took another drink, then opened the desk drawer and retrieved her medication pack, removing two tablets which she swallowed with the aid of the last of the water. When he stopped chortling he asked, “And what happens if one of the many troublemakers you have here decides it would be a really clever idea to poke around at Gravtec? Surely that’s a possible risk? As you said, you do have rather a lot of potentially awkward groups in that respect.”  
  
She smiled a little grimly. “I have a strong feeling that if they _do_ try it’ll be the last thing they do, one way or the other. Which would at least prevent repeat offenses. I can’t say I’m _happy_ about that, but on the other hand, if you’re stupid enough to poke the military in the face you shouldn’t be too surprised that you pull back a bloody stump if you’re _lucky_. They’re serious about whatever it is they’re doing. Hopefully Kaiser, Lung, and anyone else of that ilk are smart enough to work that out.” She sighed a little. “Although I wouldn’t want to put money on it.”  
  
“And if that happens?” he asked curiously.  
  
“We wait for the shooting to stop and pick up what’s left,” she replied, shaking her head. “I think even Lung might have trouble if someone decides to use an anti tank rocket on him before he’s ramped up enough. Our own rules of engagement prevent that, but I’m damn certain theirs _don’t_.”  
  
“Worrying.”  
  
“Evolution in action if they’re idiots,” she retorted.  
  
Legend studied her for a moment. “That’s one way to put it, I suppose.” He didn’t look entirely comfortable with the idea, she noticed.  
  
Leaning back Emily waved a hand at the window. “Again, it’s not something I _can_ do anything about, there are a lot of reasons saying I _shouldn’t_ do anything about it even if I could, and to be brutally honest if you or the Chief Director wants more information on it, you need to go directly to DARPA and ask. And I assume she’s already tried that approach, without any luck, hence your presence here. I can’t tell you, _or_ her, anything more than I already have. Sorry.”  
  
She wasn’t, and she knew he could tell, which slightly amused her. He studied her for a while, then nodded.  
  
“Fair enough. Thank you for what you’ve said, Emily, and I won’t mention to Rebecca your opinion of her.” He smiled.  
  
Emily shrugged. “She knows. But thanks anyway.” After a moment, as she watched him stand and walk over to the window again, where he looked out at the distant docks, then off to the side at the Rig, she asked, “Are you planning on staying any longer?” She was merely curious, more than anything else.  
  
The man turned to her. “I have a few other people to talk to, but I’ll be heading back tonight.” He walked over as she stood herself and held out his hand, which she shook. “Until next time, Director.”  
  
“Legend.” She waited until he left her office, the door closing quietly behind him, then sat with relief as her back was killing her. “Damn it, that woman is going to cause trouble, I can _feel_ it,” she muttered, annoyed. Wondering if she should discreetly let General Calhoun know about this, she eventually decided that yet again it was something best kept well away from.   
  
And considering who it was that was at the heart of the whole bizarre situation she wouldn’t want to assume his people didn’t already know, anyway.  
  
Shaking her head, she turned to her computer and got back to work, wanting to finish the current stack of reports before she finally went home for the night.  
  
The work never stopped, after all.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=  
**  
“I’m sorry I can’t divulge any of this information, Dragon,” Colin said to his friend as he quickly scanned the latest documentation he’d acquired from Gravtec. “I’ve asked that you be allowed clearance, but the security requirements are at the moment very strict. I’m told that it’s likely that Canada and other US allies will be read in on aspects of the Gravtec patents within the next year, in all likelihood, though.”  
  
“That’s all right, Colin,” she said with a smile. “I’m well aware of security protocols and NDAs, believe me. There are things I’m not allowed to tell anyone else as well. Life’s like that.”  
  
“Indeed. Annoying as it can be sometimes.” He shook his head slowly in awe yet again of the sheer elegance of the mathematics involved in the new theory, which tied together so many things that had puzzled physicists for literally centuries. “I would dearly like to meet and talk to the person behind this work,” he added. “The clarity of thought and efficiency of work is… startling.”  
  
“You think it’s one person?” she asked curiously. “Couldn’t it be a group effort?”  
  
He pondered her question. “It _could_ be, yes,” he finally replied. “And in some ways it’s more believable that such a remarkable breakthrough would come from a collaborative effort over years of work. But on the other hand. Professor Drekin remarked that it was down to one exceptionally gifted individual and I have no reason to doubt his word. And the sheer… cleanliness… of the entire theory and prototype designs suggest to me a single source who has done the entire work from first principles. It shows a deep understanding of concepts that are _far_ beyond currently accepted theoretical limits.”  
  
“Fascinating. Truly fascinating,” Dragon mused.  
  
“Agreed.” He tabbed to the next page, then read a couple of paragraphs, before examining a diagram. “I can see in the documentation the point where aspects subtly change to suggest other people became involved, but that’s mostly if not entirely in the practical engineering side of things. I would imagine that once they had hand-built working prototypes their team spent time optimizing the designs for mass production, which would undoubtedly involve multiple engineers and technicians feeding back ideas and modifications to the originator of the system.”  
  
“That’s the way it normally goes, yes,” she nodded. “I take it they have a well equipped facility?”  
  
“Very much so, yes. One can instantly tell that resources aren’t the bottleneck,” he replied with a small smile, facing her. “And from what I saw on my visit, they have a considerable number of very talented people from different disciplines working together. I was genuinely impressed.”  
  
“High praise indeed,” she teased, making him smile slightly again.  
  
“Well deserved praise, I think. The end result is remarkable, and I can see several immediate applications for it in my own work, once I get clearance to field the end result.” He leaned over to the side and retrieved an egg-sized device, encased in a smooth polymer shell. Holding the small ovoid machine in the view of the camera, he tapped a key on one of his keyboards, then let go. “This is my own duplication of the patent for the basic reference frame regenerator. I built one exactly as in the design notes provided by Gravtec to validate the design, then spent some time optimizing it for size. I can go smaller but this seemed like a practical test version.”  
  
Dragon inspected the thing with interest as it placidly hung in space without any sound or visual effect. He gently prodded it, making it move sideways, then reached over and turned a control on the console next to him which made it go up, then down. “I can’t see any visual distortions like you commonly get with some antigravity Tinker designs,” she commented. “And it appears to be completely silent.”  
  
“It’s amazingly efficient, and very powerful,” he replied, nodding. Turning the thing off with his hand under it, he caught the device, then held it up between thumb and forefinger. “With suitable software it can provide lift, propulsion, inertial compensation effects, and a number of other useful functions. This one is more than powerful enough to act as a drive for a two person aircraft without any difficulty.”  
  
“And you’re going to make a flying bike with it, of course,” she said wryly, her avatar’s mouth rising on one side.   
  
Colin almost grinned. “You do know me rather well,” he admitted.  
  
His friend laughed. “I do, yes. Well, be careful with it. Don’t accidentally end up in orbit. The Simurgh might take offense.”  
  
Putting the device back, he shook his head. “I’m not planning on spaceflight any time soon, but a more efficient bike with flight capacity would be very useful,” he replied.  
  
After a couple of seconds, she asked, “You’re totally certain it’s not the work of a Tinker or Thinker?”  
  
With a nod, he replied, “By now, yes, I am. I was _mostly_ sure when I left Gravtec, almost certain when I read the final patents once I got clearance for them, and having built the design several times now, and made modifications to it for my own purposes using the theoretical calculations, I’m entirely satisfied that it’s not in any way the result of Parahuman powers. It’s too… understandable… for that to be the case.”  
  
He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the side of his nose as he tried to work out how to explain it, while his friend waited patiently.  
  
“Over the years I’ve studied a _lot_ of other Tinker work, yours included,” he eventually said. “For want of a better term, there’s a… pattern… to it. Even with my own work. Aspects of how the device in question is made, tiny tells in the basic design, minor similarities or indeed differences between different people’s work in the same area… You learn to spot it if you look carefully enough.”  
  
She nodded slowly, looking thoughtful. “I understand what you mean, although it’s not really something I’ve had to talk about before.”  
  
“This, though,” he went on, holding up the little machine again for a moment. “This _doesn’t_ show anything like that. It’s entirely mundane, if that’s a good way to put it, even with the remarkable result it produces. Everything in this could be understood by any talented electronics engineer and probably at least crudely duplicated by a bright high school student. They might not understand the _theory_ behind it, but they could copy the design and make it function, I’m fairly sure of that. In much the same way you don’t need a postgraduate degree in electrooptics theory to make a functional if basic carbon dioxide laser from easily available parts, you merely need time and patience combined with care and a lot of hard work.”  
  
“A complex theory with a fairly straightforward practical implementation,” she noted, making him nod.  
  
“Exactly that, yes. Which is completely different from any Tinker tech I’ve ever encountered. The implementations are invariably entirely opaque, even if they work well. Many designs of that nature shouldn’t work at all, according to everything science knows, and as you’re well aware trying to reverse engineer such a device almost invariably results in nothing useful at all. Even when it _does_ submit to some understanding of the basic principles those have always been trivial edge cases and aspects that aren’t important in the overall design. You’re about the only one who’s ever been able to copy anything significant and you’ve told me more than once that even you don’t often fully understand _how_ something works, only that it _does_ and how to functionally copy it.”  
  
“Yes, that’s certainly correct,” she said after a few seconds. “The more of that sort of work I do the more I learn, but I’d be the first to admit that almost every Tinker design I’ve investigated seems to be a completely unique design with little to nothing in common with anything else. It makes deriving the underlying principles almost impossible.”  
  
“I sometimes find myself wondering if that’s somehow deliberate,” he remarked, causing her to look at him with an intrigued expression. “Tinker tech is _so_ opaque that it makes you wonder if somehow it’s been designed specifically for that purpose. By who and why I have no idea, but it’s crossed my mind more than once.”  
  
Appearing to think that over, she eventually nodded slowly. “I can’t deny I’ve had similar thoughts once or twice. Powers are certainly extremely puzzling at the best of times, and that aspect is one of the more confusing ones. But I’ve never been able to work out how you could actually _prove_ anything like that.”  
  
Colin shrugged a little. “Neither have I, not for lack of thinking about it.” He glanced at the Gravtec document open on the monitor, then moved the mouse to close it. “But the one conclusion I _am_ certain of is that Gravtec don’t have those limitations, and their technology isn’t the result of powers. Despite what I suspect certain parties might wish.”  
  
She smiled at him. “I can imagine.” A moment passed, then she said, “That aside, have you had any more thoughts on the design I sent you last week?”  
  
“The new thruster? Yes, I’ve been thinking about that and I believe I can see a few places where it could be improved,” he replied, dismissing the Gravtec oddity from his mind in favor of collaboration with his best friend, something he thoroughly enjoyed.  
  
Soon they were deep in discussion of some esoteric designs and having considerable satisfaction in the results.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
As she studied the results of the last few hours work, Taylor yawned widely. It was nearly three in the morning and she really needed to go to bed, but she’d been so fascinated by some of the data she’d logged that she’d found herself losing track of the time.  
  
Hitting a key, she reran the latest simulation using data from her subspace detection system and watched as a complex graph formed after a few seconds, trillions of calculations being done by the computer under the desk. It was something that most universities would have been pleased to have, absolute cutting edge parallel processing hardware, and had made her work much faster.   
  
Although she had some ideas about how to make something better. That could wait for now though.  
  
Leaning forward she inspected the graph very carefully, absently pushing her glasses up her nose a little, then made a few notes on a pad next to her. It was almost full by now.  
  
“Hmmm...” she hmmmed in a reflective sort of way. “That’s… Ahhh… I see. Yes. That makes sense. Kind of.”  
  
Tweaking the calculations in another program, she saved the result and ran it. The graph changed making her smile and nod. “Yep. I thought so. I wonder who’s doing that and how?”  
  
Sliding her chair sideways she grabbed the bench to stop, then tapped on the keyboard of her subspace detector computer system, while glancing over her shoulder at the other monitor every now and then. Shortly she’d added a function that should specifically look for the phenomenon she’d been studying and gather a wider variety of information on what was happening. With any luck she’d get a repeat occurrence and be able to narrow down on the variables she was still missing.  
  
After twenty minutes she finished tuning the detector code and started it running, watched it for a little while to check nothing had gone wrong, then went back to her main computer. “Right, we’ll see what that produces. And if I’m right, it could be really cool.”  
  
She wrote up more neatly some of her conclusions and observations in her latest project workbook, ‘ _Subspace Portal Theory Notes,_ ’ then put it away. Having spent another fifteen minutes quickly sketching out a very preliminary prototype circuit block diagram based on the work she’d spent the evening doing, she filed that, got up, turned off the alien sound track, made sure that everything was recording properly, and went up to bed. The lights went out and the door at the top of the stairs closed, leaving the basement silent and dark except for faint fan noises and blinky lights all over the place.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=  
**  
Having bade farewell to the last of the people he’d wanted to talk to, Paul lifted into the air and headed east. His visit had produced quite a lot of information, but very little of it was new. Rebecca was going to be quite peeved, he was sure of that. The woman was _not_ pleased about the current state of affairs and he was mildly worried about her likely reaction. She really didn’t like not knowing things she felt she should do, and at times this was somewhat awkward.  
  
Emily Piggot was entirely correct in her summation of his friend, he thought, feeling both amused and a little sad. Rebecca was a control freak’s control freak at times.  
  
He wasn’t going to tell her that, though. That way lay a lot of shouting.  
  
Flying slowly at a couple of thousand feet, he looked down at Brockton Bay. The city was definitely a strange place by most people’s standards, Emily was right about that too. From up here it looked fairly normal, but at street level… odd things happened more often than you’d expect. Many of them very unpleasant.   
  
Paul wouldn’t want to live there.  
  
He could see off to the side the docks and the Gravtec/DWU facility deep inside that area, which stood out by being well lit and a hive of activity even at five AM. Apparently they worked a very vigorous night shift. He wondered what else was going on there other than scrapping old ships and occasionally flying one across the bay.  
  
Smiling a little, he shook his head. It seemed likely that even stranger things were on the horizon. Hopefully not dangerous ones, but who knew? All he could do right now was go back and tell Rebecca what he’d learned, which wasn’t much, and see what happened next. He was fairly sure, as a result of his various discussions, that trying to push harder for real data was probably only going to backfire in a potentially serious manner and while he was very curious, he wasn’t so curious as to want to risk that. Not yet, anyway.  
  
And after he’d finally finished his mission, he could finally go home to his husband and get some sleep before the next panic, which was bound to happen soon enough. It always did.  
  
Speeding up, he was shortly well off shore. Descending to a few hundred feet, he hovered in place and said, “Door to Rebecca’s office.” Once the portal formed he flew through it, the hole in space closing immediately.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=  
**  
In the Hebert household basement, various instruments noted certain new data and saved it for later examination.


	12. Black Bag

Amy looked around as she heard someone sit down, smiling at Taylor who’d slid into the desk next to her. “Cutting it fine,” she whispered while the teacher checked the roll.  
  
Her friend grinned quickly, wiping a strand of hair out of her face and tucking it behind her ear. “Overslept,” she whispered back, as she unpacked her notebook, textbook, and pen, putting them on the desk and her backpack on the floor under her chair.  
  
“Again? That’s like four times in the last three weeks, Taylor. Are you getting enough sleep?” Amy felt mild concern. The other girl nodded, smiling.  
  
“Yeah, I just had a couple of projects I got really into at home and lost track of the time,” she replied. “I’m fine, really. Thanks, though.”  
  
The teacher cleared this throat meaningfully and both of them quickly looked frontwards, putting on a serious expression of studious eagerness. He gazed narrowly at them, then nodded in satisfaction. “All right, then, my young friends, today we are learning about neurons. Turn to page forty nine, please, and pay attention.”  
  
Amy, who in some senses didn’t _need_ to learn biology, was still fascinated by it, and listened carefully. She noticed that Taylor was doing the same, paying rapt attention and taking notes now and then in a very neat hand without looking down.  
  
While she’d only known the girl for a few weeks, she was rather impressed with her, and was pleased to count her as a friend. She wondered if Taylor might like to come over to her house sometime for a meal.  
  
It was something to consider. Right now, though, she was studying a picture of an axon and comparing it to what her own ability told her about such things.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“Mr Calvert.”  
  
Thomas twitched, then groaned.  
  
“Ah. You are still alive. Excellent, I was beginning to wonder if we were slightly overenthusiastic.”  
  
Blinking hard, he tried to work out what the hell was going on. The last thing he could remember was getting out of his car in his home garage, then…  
  
 _He was sitting at his desk in his base a hundred meters under the middle of the city, when the entire room jumped slightly. Dust settled from the ceiling onto the surface in front of him. He looked at it, puzzled, and ran a finger across the desk, lifting his hand to see the glove of his costume covered in gray powder. Looking up he saw the light fixtures in the ceiling flicker momentarily.  
  
“What the hell?” he muttered as he turned to his computer and brought up the base security status screen, his eyes widening in shock when he saw indicators on all four entrances, the main one, the two escape ones his mercenaries knew about, and the last one only _**_he_** _was aware of, showing that they were currently opening. No alarms were going off as they should have done, but even as he watched the status of the doors went from closed to open, then the sensors stopped reporting. Looking up at the monitors on the wall where dozens of camera views were display, he was just in time to see them all go blank in a couple of seconds, one after another.  
  
“Shit!” he yelped, spinning around and slamming his hand down on the main emergency alarm button behind him on the wall. It depressed with a click.  
  
And that was it. There was no other result.  
  
That was not supposed to happen. And was very, very bad.  
  
Rotating it to unlatch it, then slamming it again, harder, resulted in another click but nothing useful. Giving up on it, he spun his chair around to the computer again and tried the icon to achieve the same result via different means, but that only got a message on his screen saying ‘Function Error 2.’ He had no idea what that was except very wrong indeed.  
  
Giving up on it, he grabbed his sidearm out of the top drawer and checked it had a magazine in, then picked up the other two in the same drawer and put them into one of the hidden pockets in his bodysuit as he stood. Quickly walking across the office to the main security console he typed in two passwords one after the other, held his hand over the RF ID reader so it could register the tag in his glove, then typed in the final password. Once the console decided he was authorized it popped up a display showing the locations of every single person in the base according to the internal sensors, the status of his self destruct system, and a secondary camera network feed in critical areas.  
  
The news was grim.  
  
His self destruct system had somehow been disabled, showing as offline, the main server room was on fire, the armory was literally filling with water as he watched in horror, one of the water mains that ran under it having apparently exploded, and the few cameras that showed his mercenaries displayed a lot of people draped over various things with a few of them frantically running around trying to put on gas masks. Even as he stared in horror the rest of them dropped limply to the floor.  
  
He heard a hissing sound above him. Looking up, he saw a set of dim lights surrounding an obvious lens sticking out of one of the ventilation ducts, along with a nozzle which was spraying a fine mist into the room. His vision started to swim but he was able to barely make out some sort of small machine behind the lights and lens, looking like a tiny tracked vehicle.  
  
Trying to raise the pistol, his hand shook as he gasped for breath, then sank to his knees. His finger squeezed down on the trigger, but before the weapon could fire he felt blackness take him.  
  
The timeline ended._  
  
He’d been on the way home in the other timeline when whatever had attacked his base had done so. Frantically trying to work out what the hell had happened and who was responsible he’d rigidly controlled his reaction and calmly followed the routine drive from the PRT building to his house. The attack had come out of nowhere. He’d had no warning, no indications that the PRT knew anything about him, or that anyone else did either. His tame Thinker hadn’t mentioned a thing about possible threats, but then she was a little bitch who’d never volunteer a word given the choice. Possibly he simply hadn’t asked the right questions…  
  
Who was it who behind what happened? _Was_ it the PRT? He hadn’t seen any sign of the attackers other than the little machine that had gassed him. He’d only been able to guess that they’d entered at the surface in one of the heavily disguised cooling vents and somehow made it past the various traps in the ventilation system without setting off any alarms. Probably a Tinker involved, then. Armsmaster? Someone new?  
  
Possibly one of the gangs, but the Merchants were idiots so seemed extremely unlikely, it wasn’t Lung’s style as he’d just have blown the doors in and stomped inside setting everything on fire on the way, and Kaiser, while sneaky enough, didn’t have Tinkers as far as he knew. And to the best of his knowledge had no idea where his base was anyway, nor any particular reason to attack him like that.  
  
So who _was_ it? Clearly the perpetrator had a lot of inside knowledge. There was no way he could see that all his alarms could have been disabled so cleanly without that, nor the armory and server rooms destroyed that efficiently. It spoke of a lot of data on his facilities that _no one_ should have had, along with a significant amount of resources and work. And likely patience too, as he couldn’t see it happening as a spur of the moment effort. No, it was someone organized, far too well informed, and ruthless.  
  
After all he didn’t know for _sure_ that whatever gas had been used was lethal, but he sure wasn’t going to assume otherwise.  
  
It was going to take a lot of careful work to discover the people behind the attack. He had to assume his base was compromised and probably at least some of his mercenaries in the pocket of his attacker. The total lack of any warning was the really worrying part, he had no idea who was watching him and what they actually knew.  
  
If it _was_ the PRT, which appeared the most likely source of the attack, it almost certainly _wasn’t_ the ENE division. He’d have found out about it if it was, as his taps into their systems was more than enough to make hiding an operation of this size impossible. So it seemed probable that another division, probably not Boston, but perhaps Chicago, had somehow located him and moved in without notifying Piggot.  
  
It would be more complex to confirm it if that was the case, he didn’t have very many resources past Boston yet, but he did have a few people he could lean on for more information. As soon as he got home, he could check that his backup, and much smaller, base was intact, then start the process of discovering who had caused him so much trouble. And when he found them he wasn’t in the mood to be _pleasant_ about expressing his disapproval.  
  
And if that girl was in some way involved, well, she was not going to enjoy it _at all._  
  
Pulling into his driveway he’d hit the button to open the garage, driven into it, and closed the door as he turned the engine off. Then he’d opened the door, got out of the car, and…  
  
There’d been a tiny noise behind him followed by a prick on the back of his neck. The world had gone swirly.  
  
And now he was here, dry mouthed and feeling like he’d been rolled up in a carpet and dragged down several flights of stairs by careless movers. What the _fuck_ was going on?  
  
And who was talking?  
  
He tried to ask a question, but only produced a croak. He couldn’t see anything, while turning his head produced a rustling sound. After a few blurry seconds of thought he came to the conclusion that there was something over his head. As sensation came back to him in a rush of pins and needles he realized with worry that his hands were apparently tied behind him, and a twitch of his legs showed that they were also bound to something.  
  
This wasn’t good.  
  
Not even a little.  
  
A moment later light agonizingly stabbed into his eyes as whatever was over his head was removed. Involuntary tears streaming from them, he blinked frantically, looking around for some indication of what was going on and who was doing it.  
  
All he could see for several seconds was a very bright light in front of him, with shadows elsewhere. As his eyes adapted to the light, he was able to make out a silhouette just to the side, and some distance behind the light there were hints of movement. He glanced from side to side, then down, seeing that he was still wearing the suit he’d had on when he’d been grabbed and was apparently bound to a metal chair which was bolted to a concrete floor. The room it was in was fairly large as he couldn’t make out the walls past the blindingly bright light pointing at him.  
  
“I would apologize for the somewhat cliché arrangement but it’s still quite effective,” whoever it was that had spoken before said in icily calm tones. It was the voice of a woman, sounding professional and unhurried.  
  
“Who the hell are you?” he croaked, licking his lips which felt numb.  
  
The woman moved slightly, the light that was pointing at his face shifting so he didn’t need to squint, then she came closer so he could see her. She was of medium height, sharp featured and with red hair, and was regarding him with a sort of emotionless interest.  
  
“Who I am is at the moment not really relevant to you, Mr Calvert. It may become so in the future, depending on various parameters. One of those is whether you are alive, of course.”  
  
She pulled an office chair on wheels from somewhere past the light and sat down, adjusting the legs of her suit as she did so, then regarded him closely. “Thomas Calvert, formerly a member of the Parahuman Response Team special forces group, one of the two survivors of the Ellisburg event. Also known as Coil, a Parahuman Villain who fancies himself as something of a mastermind would-be ruler of Brockton Bay.”  
  
His heart sank into his boots at her comment. This was _really_ not good.  
  
“Where am I?” he demanded hoarsely. “I want to speak to a lawyer. You’ve kidnapped me, you won’t identify yourself… Are you PRT?”  
  
She smiled a little grimly. “Oh, no, Mr Calvert, I’m not associated with the PRT. I _am_ associated with a department of the United States government which is currently tasked with… cleaning up some problems. You are one of those problems, one that potentially could have made our jobs more difficult. It was decided that somewhat more direct action was required in your case than in some of the other ones we’re handling.”  
  
She crossed her legs one over the other and leaned forward, inspecting him with interest as he blanched. “We are fully aware of your abilities, by the way, and precautions have been taken. You are highly unlikely to succeed in any escape attempt, and the results if you _did_ would prove… final. On the other hand, if you cooperate, your life will be...” The woman paused as he stared at her. “Longer. Definitely longer. And possibly quite comfortable although I’ll admit that’s not a priority at the moment.”  
  
He thought frantically. Who the hell did this woman work for? CIA? FBI? No, the FBI didn’t do this sort of black bag operation, it was unlikely to be them. CIA was a possibility but it didn’t quite fit. Someone who had somehow found out way too much, that was clear, and by the sound of it someone who was a lot more ruthless than he liked.  
  
Thomas wasn’t used to being on the receiving side of this sort of thing.  
  
He decided he didn’t like it much.  
  
“What do you want?”  
  
“Oh, we want everything, Mr Calvert,” she replied with a small hard smile. “We already have the contents of your databases, but I’m sure there are things locked up in your head which will prove useful.” Standing, she walked over to him and reached out, tapping his forehead right between the eyes. “We would very much like to know all the little facts you have squirreled away in there, along with all the plans you were making for your empire building goals. And sooner or later I’m sure you’ll tell us.”  
  
The finger tapped him once more, while he sweated bullets. Then she stepped back.  
  
“How?” he finally said. She raised an elegant eyebrow.  
  
“How what, Mr Calvert?”  
  
“How did you do it? How did you find me, how did you infiltrate my base?”  
  
A voice that was much, much too familiar, and so smug it burned, spoke from off to one side.  
  
“Oh, that part was fairly simple, Boss,” Tattletale said as she stepped into the light, a vicious grin on her face that made him think for a moment that she was going to go for his throat. “They made me an offer I really didn’t have to think very hard to accept. In fact it was a positive joy. And I know more about you than you do in some ways.”  
  
The little blonde bitch leaned down and smirked at him as he gaped, feeling a disorientating mix of total confusion and white-hot fury. She _had_ been involved. He was going to kill the little cunt.  
  
“No, you’re not, ex-Boss,” she smirked. “The days where _you_ are going to put a gun to someone’s head are gone. You’re screwed, I win.” Leaning close to his ear, she added very quietly “Mua ha ha.”  
  
Standing again as he shook with rage, she said, “The rest of my team says hi, by the way. And fuck you.”  
  
The blonde grinned nastily at him, nodded to the red-headed woman who was watching with a hint of a smile, before disappearing into the darkness. His captor looked after him then turned back.  
  
“Not a friend of yours, I fear, Mr Calvert. No matter. You’re unlikely to meet again. Miss Tattletale has other tasks which won’t bring her to cross your path. And, of course, _you_ will be rather busy for the foreseeable future.”  
  
He swallowed hard, wondering how the hell he was going to get out of this...  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“General Calhoun is here to see you, Director.”  
  
Emily looked at her screen and the video chat window that had popped up from her assistant, sighed a little, and nodded while pushing the hard-copy report she was hand annotating to the side. “Send him in,” she replied.  
  
Moments later her office door opened to admit the DARPA man, who closed it and walked over as she stood. After a quick handshake he sat. “What can I do for you today, General?” she asked, fearing the worst.  
  
“It’s more what I can do for you, Director,” he replied with an easy smile. Reaching into his inner pocket he produced a couple of USB sticks which he put on her desk. She looked quizzically at them, then raised her gaze to his face.  
  
“And these are?” she asked, not reaching for them.  
  
“The red one has details of the moles in your organization, along with full dossiers on them all, payment details, blackmail data, times and dates of when they acted for outside sources, and other relevant information,” he replied as she froze in shock. “The blue one is a full list of all the exploits and holes in your security and computer network including suggested patches.”  
  
She stared at him for close to thirty seconds before she could bring herself to speak. Eventually she swallowed, took a couple of deep breaths, and very carefully asked, “Where did you get this information?”  
  
“It was passed along to us by another agency who came across it during a classified operation, the details of which I’m unfortunately not at liberty to divulge. It’s been carefully checked and is valid. They felt that you’d like to deal with the internal issues yourself, although certain external ones have already been handled.” He looked slightly apologetic. “We have no beef with you, and I don’t want to cause any trouble if it can be avoided. You should be able to clean house using that information, and we didn’t see any reason to involve the rest of the PRT. Especially considering your… minor disagreements… with the Chief Director.” Calhoun smiled a little as she grunted in irritation.  
  
“You know about that.”  
  
“Oh, we keep ourselves informed, yes,” he assured her. “Between you and me I find her somewhat difficult to like. Competent, but...” He shrugged one shoulder.  
  
Giving him a look, she finally reached out for the two USB drives, inserting the red one into her computer and waiting for the security check to finish before opening it. A large list of files appeared, neatly categorized by department. Her eyes widened at the sheer number of them.  
  
“Jesus,” she breathed, almost hesitantly opening the first document. A quick skim of the contents made her stomach turn over. “Oh, hell. So _that’s_ what happened to the E88 raid two years ago...”  
  
This was going to be a _nightmare_ to deal with.  
  
“I’m not sure if I should thank you or shoot you,” she growled, looking up at him. He gazed back with clear sympathy on his face.  
  
“I understand, and I’m sorry to cause you trouble, Director. But it needed to be passed on.”  
  
Glancing back at her screen, she nodded heavily. “True. It’s still going to be a massive pain in the ass.” Sighing, she stood and held out her hand again. “Thank you.”  
  
“My pleasure. Good luck.” He shook it, then stepped back, turned, and left. She dropped into her chair with a grunt and started going through the data, making notes on who was going to get fired, and who was going to go to jail for decades.  
  
Eventually she picked up her phone and started making calls.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Closing the door of the warehouse behind her, Taylor looked around with a smile, then pulled yet another modified cellphone out of her pocket. She was going to have to get around to integrating all her sensors and other toys into one device soon or she’d be carrying more of the things around than seemed plausible, she decided as she turned it on and waited for it to boot. Once it was running she initialized the detector array with a tap on the correct icon, checked it calibrated properly, then went over to the far left side and started walking slowly down the aisle, scanning the towering racks of boxes and containers with her device.  
  
It took her twenty minutes to get the first traces of what she was looking for.  
  
“I _knew_ it,” she muttered under her breath, smiling broadly. “I was sure there was more in here somewhere. Considering how long they’ve been collecting stuff for, it had to be.”  
  
Moving around as she waved the repurposed phone about, she slowly localized the tiny variation in background quantum interference noise her scanner was filtering out of the much larger changes other sources of such things produced. It had taken some very careful work and a lot of thought, but she’d finally come up with a method after half a dozen failures, one of which had left an impressive scorch mark on her bench and come close to removing her eyebrows. She’d had to trim her bangs a little to cover the damage and had been blinking quite a lot for an hour or so.  
  
The flash had been quite bright.  
  
And her father had been quite sarcastic about the bang, not to mention pointedly handing her a set of safety goggled which she’d accepted with a rueful smile and mild shame.  
  
Still, science sometimes bit you. It was just one of those risks.  
  
But in the end she’d managed to achieve her goal. Now she followed the changing graphs on the screen with complete concentration, eventually stopping half way down one aisle, before slowly raising the scanner to point at the fourth shelf up. Nodding in satisfaction she put the thing in her pocket, then walked off, coming back a few minutes later pushing the rolling stairs with some effort. Getting them next to the shelf she scurried up them, then scanned the boxes in front of her until the readings peaked. Putting the modified phone next to her on the steps she leaned over and hauled the large box closer so she could open it, before diving in and rummaging around, a small flashlight between her teeth.  
  
Shortly thereafter she yelped in excitement and surfaced holding a metal and plastic widget about the size of a car radio. Sitting on the steps she carefully examined it with the aid of the light.  
  
“Huh. _Not_ Squealer’s work, this is much too neat. I wonder who made it?” she murmured, turning the Tinker device over in her hands, then squinting into one of the gaps in the casing. Pulling a small screwdriver out of her pocket she quickly located and removed several screws, then opened the thing and looked at the innards with interest.  
  
“OK. Cool… still wrong, but not _as_ wrong. Pretty neat too. Nice wiring.” She kept mumbling to herself as she leaned over the thing on her knees while studying it closely. “Leet, maybe? Definitely not Squealer. Might be someone else but I can’t think of any other Tinker around here other than Armsmaster and I can’t see him leaving his stuff lying around...”  
  
Eventually she shrugged, screwed the lid back on, and put the thing in her backpack, before scanning the box again to make sure no more Tinker tech was hiding inside. Not detecting any of the minute quantum noise it seemed to produce, she shoved the box back into place then descended to the floor again, waving the scanner around once more with a questing expression.  
  
Soon she was following another signal. She was very pleased that her guess had been right, the DWU had indeed managed to pick up other random Tinker scrap over the years.  
  
She was very intrigued by what she’d learn by studying it. And figuring out how it tied into her steadily improving understanding of Parahuman powers.  
  
Eventually she was going to work out what was hiding behind the phenomenon. It might take a while, and perhaps a missing eyebrow or two, but they’d grow back and she was patient.  
  
And this was fun, too, as well as educational.  
  
When she left the warehouse two and a half hours later, covered in dust and cobwebs and lugging a fairly heavy backpack, she was definitely feeling in a good mood. She trotted off to the Gravtec offices whistling happily, smiling at the large man with a gun he thought was hidden in his jacket who nodded to her as she passed.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“ _There_ you guys are.”  
  
Danny looked around at his daughter’s voice, Angus also turning to see the girl standing in the doorway to his office grinning at them. She seemed in a good mood even for her.  
  
“Hi, dear. Did you need us for something?” He looked at his watch. “No more tests today, I thought?”  
  
“No, we’re done with that series,” she replied, coming in and closing the door. “Got all the data we need, we can move on to phase two soon. This is something different.”  
  
He examined her face suspiciously. He knew that tone of voice.  
  
“You’ve done something again, haven’t you?” he probed cautiously as Angus looked between them, then moved to his chair and sat down with an expectant expression. She waved a hand in front of her.  
  
“Kinda, yeah.”  
  
“Something that’s going to make me lose what little hair I have left, or something that’s not quite that worrying?”  
  
She giggled at his tone of voice. “Bit of both, probably.”  
  
“Oh, lord,” he sighed, sitting down himself and staring at her. “What now?”  
  
“You remember that stuff we found in the store room?”  
  
He thought back a couple of weeks and nodded slowly and carefully. “The Tinker devices?”  
  
Angus looked sharply at him, then very thoughtfully at Taylor, who was still smiling.  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“What about them?” he asked warily.  
  
She put her backpack on the table at the side of the room and opened it, pulling out a device he recognized as the first one she’d found. It looked like it had been cleaned up and the wiring that was hanging out the side was now gone. Putting it on Angus’s desk she tapped it as both men leaned over to inspect the thing.  
  
“This is _trying_ to be an optical diversion field generator, and doing a very inefficient job of it,” she said. Angus and Danny exchanged bemused glances, then turned to look at her. She sighed faintly and added, “A cloaking device.”  
  
“Ah.” Angus nodded. “I recall Squealer is known for such inventions.”  
  
“She’s not very good at it,” Taylor said with some asperity. “The tolerances on most of the field coils are horrible, the wiring is substandard, most of the circuitry is seriously underrated, and quite a lot of it is entirely wrong. I mean, it _sort_ of works, but it _shouldn’t_.”  
  
“That’s rather the point with Tinker technology, though?” Angus commented, sounding a little confused. “No one can properly understand how it works, not even the Tinker who made it.”  
  
She put her hands on her hips and glared at the device like it had personally insulted her. “Well, I understand how it’s _meant_ to work, and she did a really bad job of implementing it.” His daughter shrugged. “So I did it right.”  
  
They gaped a little at her, before exchanging another glance. “You… did _what_ right?” Danny asked with trepidation.  
  
“I reverse engineered her toy and fixed the bugs, then made a better one,” Taylor smiled, pulling out her phone.  
  
Angus cleared his throat, making her and Danny both look at her. “Taylor, I know full well that you’re probably smarter than any six normal engineers put together but people have been trying to understand how Tinker technology works for nearly thirty years and… good lord.”  
  
Both of them stared in shock at where Taylor had been standing, and was now an entirely empty patch of carpet. She’d raised the phone and tapped an icon, then simply disappeared. Very slowly Danny stood, before cautiously reaching out with one hand.  
  
“Boo!” she shouted as she reappeared a couple of feet to the left, making him nearly jump over Angus’s desk in shock. They gaped at her as she collapsed in giggles. “Your faces,” she chortled, pointing. “That was fantastic.”  
  
Taking a couple of breaths, Danny calmed his racing heart, then walked over to her and put his arm over her shoulders, which were shaking with laughter. “Taylor?”  
  
“Yes, Dad?” she said innocently, gazing at him with big eyes behind her glasses. He pinched the bridge of his nose.  
  
“Are you saying that you understand how Tinker technology actually works?” he asked mildly, feeling light headed. Angus was gaping still.  
  
She shrugged a bit. “Some of it, yeah. It’s not really _that_ difficult if you look at it right. It’s not very well designed, that makes it a bit tricky, but the underlying concepts aren’t really drastically weird. I mean, I don’t know yet if other Tinkers than Squealer will make better stuff, she might be a bit handicapped or something. I found some more widgets in the store room I think are Leet’s work and it does look much neater if nothing else. I guess she’s probably high or something a lot of the time? Maybe that explains it.” The girl looked thoughtful for a moment as he tried to parse the stream of words. “I can’t see being on drugs really _helping_ with making hardware. I know that if I drink too much tea my hands shake a little. But that coil was _really_ badly wound, I’m amazed she didn’t burn her workshop down or something...”  
  
Holding up a hand, he waited for her to stop talking. “All right. Let’s slow down and take a step back, just for me?”  
  
“Sure, dad.”  
  
“You figured out what Squealer’s device did?”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“And how it did it.”  
  
“Yep.”  
  
“Then duplicated it and made it small enough to go into a _phone?_ ”  
  
“Yep.” She grinned widely as he took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. Angus was sort of smiling while still looking stunned, he noticed. Taylor just seemed pleased with herself, which to be honest wasn’t unwarranted.  
  
“So you now have an invisibility phone.”  
  
“I do, yes.” She held it up proudly. “Still working on the sound suppression field, that one is slightly trickier to miniaturize enough and I have to recalculate all the emitter parameters from scratch, but the theory’s not too hard. And the structural field generator is coming along well, but I haven’t had time to finish it yet.”  
  
Dropping into his chair he stared at his brilliant, irrepressible, impossible daughter in silence.  
  
Eventually he shook his head in wonder and turned to Angus, who picked up the phone.  
  
“I’ll call Brendan,” the physicist said with a smile. “He’s going to love this.”  
  
Taylor produced a thick printout from her backpack. “I’ve got my design notes all written up if that helps.”  
  
“Of course you have,” he sighed. He held out his hand and Angus put a small shot glass into it, then filled it from the bottle he kept in his desk while holding the phone to his ear with his other hand.  
  
“Hello, Brendan,” the older man said with a mischievous expression, even as Danny tossed back the whiskey. “Is DARPA interested in a cloaking device small enough to go in your pocket?”  
  
All three of them could easily hear the shouting from the other end of the phone, which made Danny and Taylor both grin.


	13. Quantum Hiss

Brendan Calhoun, PhD, General, and old hand in the ways of science, stared with extreme concentration at the document he was holding as he flipped through it. As he was now easily able to recognize, the style of the author was clear, concise, accurate, and neat.  
  
And, of course, yet again took the rule book on a number of scientific disciplines, looked dismissively at it, and threw it out while muttering about doing it properly.  
  
Then did it properly.  
  
He finally leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes tiredly. Taylor, the Prime Asset, was so far past ‘ _brilliant_ ’ that an entirely different terminology was required. He’d known that, or _thought_ he’d known that, from about ten minutes after meeting her, but this latest piece of her work drove that home like nothing he’d ever encountered. The girl had _already_ single-handedly advanced the understanding of gravitics and associated fields by decades. She’d basically _invented_ the science of gravitics, for that matter. _Then_ advanced it by decades. The knock on effects just since that point had produced a larger upheaval in physics, chemistry, mathematics, electronics, and half a dozen other specialties than the entire Manhattan project had managed in its entirety.  
  
And _she kept doing it_.  
  
Every damn time he talked to Angus, it was to learn that the impossible young woman had _again_ rewritten everything they thought they knew about pretty much _everything._ She didn’t seem to know when to, or possibly _how_ to, stop. Of course, that was _why_ she was the Prime Asset, a Person of Interest to the US government that was literally the single most important person in the entire country. He wasn’t sure she even realized that, in fact he was fairly sure she _didn’t_ , because she was aside from being a genuine comic-book level super-genius a very nice, friendly and down to earth girl who was basically just having fun working out how the universe functioned. And documenting it thoroughly so lesser minds could also understand it.  
  
He very much liked Taylor, and for that matter her father, and even without her value to the country, and the world too, would have been happy to know both of them.  
  
It somewhat amused him that she was _so_ valuable a person, so _unique_ a mind, that if it came down to the President himself or her, orders were that she was the one who was saved. Orders _from_ the President himself, which was somewhat odd at best. Understandable, as the man was by no means stupid, but unusual too.  
  
Now she’d apparently decided that inventing practical antigravity and a cheap room temperature superconductor wasn’t exciting enough and had moved onto _successfully_ reverse engineering Tinker tech. Not only the anomalous engineering itself, but the theory _behind_ it. It was like she’d seen a TV for the first time and rather than just copying the functioning unit, derived all the principles upon which it worked and extrapolated from that to image compression, digital transmission standards, and game shows.  
  
From what he could understand of the thick document, she was well on her way towards a genuine theory of how Tinker tech in general worked. This particular one explained the principals behind the ‘ _optical diversion field generator_ ’ in detail, _enough_ detail that a talented engineer could duplicate her results in the same manner that had occurred with her gravitational reference frame regenerators. And more than that, a _really_ talented engineer could take that understanding and undoubtedly work out other related areas of research. It was far more than just a design document for one specific implementation of the basic idea, it was an entire field of study that would keep a whole series of university departments running for years. Or be something you could spin off a number of very successful and profitable companies on the back of.  
  
Just like gravitics, superconductors, and anything else she came up with. He was completely certain she was nowhere near finished with this sort of thing.  
  
In the long run her work was going to be the source of a massive rebuilding of society in almost every manner one could imagine, he thought. Already the US defense industry was feeling the ramifications almost everywhere, even if the ultimate source of the extraordinary new technology wasn’t yet known beyond a very small number of extremely highly vetted people. DARPA was busily dusting off hundreds of former projects that had been investigated since the fifties and shelved because of something or other that simply was beyond the knowledge of the day, and looking into which ones were now feasible. A surprising number appeared to be worth following up on. Just the superconductor alone had put a good two dozen ideas back into the running as practically doable, and that was certainly only the start.  
  
Their allies undoubtedly had other similar archives which would be amenable to reinvestigation now, and in due time this would definitely happen. The Canadians at least would be read into the program within a year or two, and others would follow. At the moment the impetus was of course on making sure that the Prime Asset was sufficiently protected once knowledge of her work became more widespread. Half the security apparatus of the US was devoted to that end, and many agencies that were so secret hardly anyone even in the government knew about them were having a lot of fun and considerable success in dealing with all manner of problems they’d wanted to handle for decades.  
  
Taylor hadn’t wanted to leave Brockton Bay, saying it was her home, and while in some ways that had presented a problem, in other ways it had been a benefit. Far enough away from the corridors of power to avoid certain parties, but close enough to a number of specific places to make it fairly easy to move people and equipment around if required. Right on the water, which was again a positive from the point of view of getting access by sea, but a negative in some ways for the same reason. And it was a city that was more than used to the peculiar which meant that with care a lot of the things that were likely to happen could be spun as just something that happened in a Parahuman hotbed like Brockton Bay, once the _actual_ Parahuman problems had been otherwise dealt with.  
  
That was a work in progress, but the latest reports showed it to be something that was quite successful so far. And it had produced a number of unexpected dividends, some of which had been useful bargaining chips for local politics, some resulting in valuable skills being acquired, and so on.  
  
All in all, while the location wasn’t one he himself would have naturally picked for the next big leap in research, it had turned out to be oddly effective to date.  
  
And BBU, with Angus Drekin involved, had also proven to be a highly valuable source of extremely intelligent people eager to work on beyond-cutting-edge physics and engineering. They seemed able to keep their mouths shut, were _very_ good at their jobs, and had no trouble working with a fifteen year old girl who was smarter than all of them together. Taken The DWU as well had shown their worth immediately being a ready made and highly motivated workforce who were remarkably loyal and very discreet.  
  
Neither he nor anyone else in the know had expected things to work so well but everyone was very glad it had.  
  
Picking up the next document he leafed through it, not going into a deep read as the very first page said that it was preliminary and still subject to change as Taylor worked on the theory. There were three more documents of a similar nature sitting on his desk, covering other Tinker widgets she’d found in the DWU storerooms. Apparently the dock workers had a habit of collecting pretty much _everything_ that people left lying around and filing it away for a rainy day. He wondered just how much stuff they really had. The place was pretty large after all, and had been around for a very long time…  
  
It might be worth investigating at some point, just to settle his own curiosity.  
  
Quickly scanning the other three binders, he finally stacked them neatly on the desk along with the first two, then sat and stared at them for a while, thinking. It was clear to him that Taylor was heading towards explaining Tinker Tech to a level that literally no one else had ever managed, and he wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she ended up cracking the entire phenomenon wide open and turning it into engineering rather than near-magic.  
  
Picking up the device next to the reports, he turned it over in his hand, studying it with near-awe. A practical invisibility generator, battery powered, reliable, and duplicatable, the size of a pack of cards. The girl had actually apologized that it wasn’t yet suitable for an entire vehicle larger than a motorcycle, saying that it was far more efficient than the rather amateur implementation she’d investigated (her words exactly) but not quite as powerful as she’d concentrated on making it work _properly_. Making it cover a larger area was easy, she’d said, and her document suggested various modifications to the hardware designs to achieve that, but she wasn’t going to waste her time building them herself as she had other projects.  
  
Brendan smiled to himself as he recalled her exasperation with Squealer’s designs. The girl took the whole Tinker thing somewhat personally, feeling it wasn’t keeping up to her own standards. This was undoubtedly true but not something anyone but her would actually care about. Simply making it work at all would be seen as miracle enough for the vast majority of people.  
  
He put the example device on top of the whole pile and leaned back in his chair, picking up the half-empty and nearly cold mug of coffee at his elbow and finishing it in a couple of gulps, before putting the empty mug down and reaching for his secure phone. He had yet more calls to make, advice to request, and people in high places to worry and excite in equal quantity.  
  
These latest developments would push the Prime Asset’s value even higher, require a number of alterations to the existing situation and protocols, and probably cause quite a few individuals both joy and concern. It would also require yet _another_ specialist team to be set up to investigate the practical ramifications of Taylor’s latest ideas and how to integrate them into the various projects being developed at a frightening pace right now. He could think of at least four separate areas where just the cloaking device would be welcomed with open arms and cries of glee.  
  
Smirking a little to himself at the thought of the likely look on the face of one specific military person, he started dialing the first of a fairly long list of numbers.  
  
It was going to be yet another long evening, but despite that he found he was enjoying his current work far more than previous arrangements.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Connecting her first sensor-laden phone to her main computer, Taylor downloaded the latest data she’d collected at school and around the city into the steadily growing collection of related information, then unplugged the device again. She pulled the keyboard in front of her and started up her analysis program, which chewed on the download for a while, running trillions of calculations on it and correlating the most recent readings with the rest of the information she’d derived up to this point.  
  
While it ran, she tabbed to the other program that was constantly monitoring Parahuman subspace anomalies around the city, at lower resolution that her phone sensors managed but over a much wider area. It showed that a number of new targets had entered the collection area, while a few had left. Most of these were congregated around the PRT building and the Rig which probably meant they were heroes visiting the city. She checked the logs and nodded to herself, then added some more annotations to her database.  
  
The target that had been located under the commercial district on a regular basis appeared to have vanished a week or two ago, and no sign of it had been seen since on her sensor grid. She idly wondered who it was and why they’d been lurking down there. It had been easy to work out it was an underground location, which was sort of cool, if somewhat odd. As far as she’d been able to find out nothing in that area had a basement deep enough to match her readings, which implied some sort of secret base. Whether that belonged to a hero or villain she had no idea, either choice being possible. Perhaps one day she’d find out, but for now it wasn’t really important.  
  
A group of four other targets that had been in the bad part of the Docks had also disappeared, her logs showing them to have moved around the city quite a lot for a while then exiting to the east and not returning. Again, she didn’t know who it was, aside from clearly being an organized group, but beyond that she was in the dark. It didn’t really matter, for the most part she wasn’t interested in the _identity_ of the targets, merely the data she could gather on their existence.  
  
There was something very odd about Parahumans in general, and she was determined to get to the bottom of it. And the more she learned the odder the whole thing was, but the more fascinating. How all this linked into subspace and quantum variations she wasn’t yet sure. On the other hand, the fact that it _did_ left a number of paths of inquiry open to her, and fitted neatly with her own interests and skills. Being able to track the end result of Parahuman abilities had helped immensely in finding Tinker Tech to examine, for instance, and the portals that had briefly appeared well off shore a while back were also extremely intriguing and clearly related to the same sort of thing.  
  
She wasn’t sure _who_ was behind them, but she had a growing understanding of _how_ such a thing could be done…  
  
And she was also coming to the conclusion, when working out the theory behind it, that yet again the Parahuman method to do what it was doing was doing it _wrong._ Or at least, very inefficiently. The math seemed to suggest that a cleaner solution to the problem was possible but she was still thinking about the whole thing and wasn’t quite at the stage of being able to test her hypothesis. Soon, though. The hardware should be fairly straightforward, once she worked out a few minor residual issues and finished the equations needed.  
  
So many projects, so little time, she thought with a smile to herself. But that was one of the things that was so much fun, of course.  
  
Noting the presence of a pair of familiar target signatures in another area in the docks, not too far from the DWU area, she zoomed in on her map and stared at the display. Some adjustments to the processing algorithms revealed what she’d suspected, traces of the minute quantum hiss that Tinker Tech emitted, although the resolution at this distance wasn’t sufficient with her current long range sensors to get a good read on the source or sources. Making some notes on improvements that would fix that issue, she put the pen down again and returned to the display. Correlating the results with those of the Rig, which she was using as a control since she was certain it was stuffed full of Tinker hardware, she nodded thoughtfully to herself.  
  
“Not quite as large a reading, but close,” she muttered, propping her chin on her hands and staring at the screen. “Gotta be Leet. Probably target one, there, I’d think, so that logically makes target two Über. Huh. I wonder if those last devices I found _were_ his stuff? I’ll need a really _good_ sensor to be sure from here...” The girl picked up her pen and notebook and spent a while thinking hard, slowly jotting down a new design for a very directional and sensitive quantum interference detector specifically capable of filtering out background noise and selectively distinguishing the type of interference pattern at long range. That task took her another forty minutes, long enough for her analysis program to finish munching its way through about two terabytes of data and ping for her attention.  
  
She glanced up at the other monitor, then wrote the last few words in her notebook, before typing a few sentences into her Parahuman detector database. When she’d finished updating it, she closed that program and switched back to the first one. Studying the resulting data with great interest, she nodded slowly to herself.  
  
“Fascinating,” she murmured under her breath, barely audible over the faint background track from the alien tutor channel playing quietly in the basement lab. Every now and then she almost subconsciously recognized a few words, glancing at the speaker with a small smile when this happened before returning her attention to the screen.  
  
Eventually she rolled the chair sideways and picked up the latest bit of hardware she’d been fiddling with, a specialized variant of the subspace detector that was an outgrowth of her Tinker Tech tracker. She’d noticed a few odd readings on the phone she’d put that device into when she’d taken it to school and had spent some time puzzling over this, finally working out that it was picking up something somewhat more subtle than the background noise of anomalous technology interfering with normal subspace. The signal was barely at the detectable threshold, being both very faint and, for want of a better term, on a different frequency. This was not at all accurate for most purposes, but she still hadn’t settled on the right terminology to describe subspace properly.  
  
The important thing right now was that _she_ knew what she meant. She’d work out how to tell other people as and when she actually _did_ tell other people about the whole thing, which was still a problem in her mind. Taylor was all too well aware that much of her work could have some pretty severe implications to both Parahumans and everyone else, many of these being potentially very unpleasant. It was something that worried her, as she didn’t want to hurt anyone, and felt that Parahumans had as much right to privacy as everyone else. Friends of hers would be affected, after all, and even leaving that aside, there were a hell of a lot of possible problems that her research could spark off.  
  
It was a tricky problem. So she was in no real hurry to tell anyone else at the moment. Not until she could work out a solution, or there was a good _reason_ to tell them. Ideally both.  
  
Dismissing this line of thought yet again, she connected the new detector unit to various pieces of test gear and her computer, then very carefully checked her work, before powering it up. Once she’d tested all the voltages were good, nothing was getting excessively hot, all the current draws were correct, and none of the magic smoke was escaping, she started testing it bit by bit. Eventually she was happy that the basic system was functional.  
  
Moving back to the computer she opened the development editor and spent a while going over her code. Spotting a couple of tiny errors she fixed them, then began writing a new processing section based on the results of her latest analysis run. After over two hours, and a few aborted compilations, she finally had something she was happy with and uploaded it to the sensor unit. When it finished flashing the new program she reset it, then fired up the front end program on the computer.  
  
Taylor studied the results the device was producing and frowned. “Weird,” she mumbled, moving sideways to the sensor package and bending over it, remembering this time to put her safety goggles on just in case. She stared at it closely, before adjusting a couple of faintly glowing coil-like structures wrapped with half a dozen oddly shaped windings in different metals. Her ceramic screwdriver distorted in a somewhat visually disturbing manner as she gently inserted it down the core of one of the components due to the multidimensional nature of the field it was producing, something she thought was rather neat. Tweaking it she looked up at the bank of power supplies, checking the readings on them, before tweaking it a tiny bit more then nodding in satisfaction. Moving to the second one she adjusted that as well, watching the readings on one analog meter jump, then settle back at a steady position.  
  
She found analog meters were sometimes invaluable for this sort of thing, since they gave an instant visual feedback a digital reading didn’t, and were easier to quickly read.  
  
Both components were now glowing a little more brightly. “That’s better,” she said to herself, pleased. “Really good resonance lock now. OK, let’s see what _that_ does...”  
  
Back at the computer, she reset the sensor unit again, then watched the program output for a while with a furrowed brow. Eventually she looked across at the thing on the bench and studied it for a few seconds. “That is… _very_ intriguing,” she commented softly to the aliens, still talking to themselves at the threshold of hearing. “Not quite a portal, but _really_ similar in some ways. And really small too.” She reached out and carefully pivoted the device ninety degrees while watching the readings, then tilted it up and down by the same amount. “And really _close_ as well.”  
  
She looked around the room, an expression of bemusement on her face. Then she got up and picked the entire sensor up off the workbench, making sure not to dislodge any of the cables connected to it, and spent a few minutes turning it in every direction possible while logging the results. When she finished she put it back and sat down again, going back over the logged data.  
  
Eventually she tilted her chair back and peered at the ceiling. “Huh. I didn’t expect _that,_ ” she said under her breath, thinking very hard. “I wonder...”  
  
By the time she went to bed, she’d opened a new project and got about half way through sketching out a design for yet another specialized sensor. She was going to have to get some very close range readings of as many different Parahumans as she could with the new device to work out what was going on.  
  
The subspace interference she’d detected coming from Parahumans seemed to have another layer to it she’d not initially noticed, one that was _definitely_ related to portals but different in a number of interesting ways.  
  
One of those ways raising the intriguing question of whether Parahumans really did have tiny little almost-portals inside their heads. And if they did, where did the other end go?  
  
Taylor was definitely going to figure _that_ one out.  
  
And even more interestingly, she was going to figure out why there was a similar but subtly different phenomenon apparently somewhere in the house itself…  
  
If something was watching her, she was damn well going to find out what it was and watch it right back. Whether it liked it or not.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
“The Prime Asset can duplicate Tinker Technology?”  
  
Secretary Robinson’s voice was flat.  
  
“Not quite that simple, sir. She can _understand_ Tinker Technology.”  
  
The woman speaking, Doctor Gabrielle Hudson, a physicist, mathematician, and engineer with four different doctorates acquired over her sixty years of life, and more than fifty patents to her name, shook her head in wonder. “At least the specific examples that were acquired from local sources. The investigation of them was unparalleled in its detail and comprehension of the underlying principles. The Prime Asset appears to be able to derive the theory behind what the specific implementation is doing, or as it was put, _trying_ to do and not quite managing that correctly, then generalizing this to a functional explanation understandable by anyone sufficiently versed in the relevant fields. I will note that despite nearly thirty years of effort across the world, no one else has _ever_ managed to do what the Prime Asset has managed apparently as a side project mostly due to curiosity.”  
  
“Unbelievable.” He stared at her, then at the report in front of him, a summary of the much more comprehensive data that General Calhoun had acquired from a recent visit to Gravtec, along with the results of a lot of careful verification work done by DARPA scientists. “And this is like the gravitic work, something that genuinely can be mass produced?”  
  
“Yes. The basic principles are surprisingly straightforward in most respects once you manage to get to grips with a far more comprehensive superset of physics than described by the Standard Model and any other current understandings of how the universe actually works. Most of which are rapidly becoming apparent as being severely lacking in numerous areas. Just the gravitational theory the Prime Asset produced opened up a vast number of paths to a _true_ understandings of physics, and clearly this has helped with the Tinker conundrum. Much of the documentation handed to DARPA relies on the previous work in many places, and without such understanding it’s now obvious that discovering how such anomalous technology functions was never going to be possible, at least without a century or so of very difficult effort.”  
  
“I see.” He rubbed his chin as he looked at the documentation, flipping through it again slowly while everyone else waited patiently. “And this isn’t simply reverse engineering specific devices? It’s a true understanding of the underlying operational theory?”  
  
“Definitely, yes, Mr Secretary.” Doctor Hudson indicated the report in front of him with the end of her pen. “We have thoroughly investigated the initial reports, and DARPA engineers and scientists have not only successfully duplicated the work involved in the original proof of concept hardware, but generalized it to a whole class of related implementations. Several of which were mentioned by the Prime Asset as possible if someone wanted to work on it. One application is an inversion of the cloaking device, which instead of bending electromagnetic radiation around a zone of space, instead reflects it directly back to where it came from. A perfect mirror, in other words, one that can in theory cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”  
  
He looked at her in amazement.  
  
“There are quite a number of practical applications for just that,” she added with a small smile. “A telescope mirror, a radiation shield, a solar power generator, perfect heat insulation, and quite a few more our people immediately thought of. Invisibility, while useful, is merely the tip of the iceberg.”  
  
“Good lord.” Robinson looked down at the report again, shook his head, and closed the folder. “Yet again I am stunned.”  
  
“That does seem to be a common result of the Prime Asset becoming interesting in something, sir,” Hudson chuckled.  
  
“So it would appear,” he agreed. Turning to one of the other people, he asked, “Does this impact on our situation vis a vis the PRT?”  
  
The Attorney General, Quentin Miles, looked thoughtful. He had a short quiet conversation with one of his associates, then looked back at Robinson. “We don’t believe so, no. The PRT can make a case that Parahumans are their responsibility, although as you are aware this is not entirely correct in all possible cases, and they do tend to assume that the results of Parahuman powers fall under their remit. However, there is a significant amount of legal precedent showing that it’s entirely feasible for Tinker Tech, for example, to be transferred perfectly legally via several methods to private or company ownership. Admittedly the NEPEA-5 laws make it hard for any Parahuman to profit from their powers, which was clearly the entire reason for passing them, something I personally feel was not well thought out, but the _stated_ intent of such laws were to prevent Parahuman abilities conferring an unfair commercial advantage.”  
  
He looked around at the others, all of whom were listening carefully.  
  
“Of course, if the Parahuman in question provides a service or product that _can’t_ be conventionally arranged, there’s a good case to be made that NEPEA laws don’t apply. Past cases have gone either way, but in the case of Tinker Tech it’s been generally considered that assuming no laws were broken in the process, and that the technology is performing a function that can’t be otherwise reasonably done in other ways, it’s entirely legal to sell or give it to someone else. Of course, there are other issues at play, with dangerous technology, weapons, self-replicating organisms or machines, that sort of thing, but there are plenty of cases where this has been done. The PRT often kicks back about it, they really don’t like not having total control of such things, but the courts certainly don’t always go their way. In fact in recent years they’ve lost more such cases than they’ve won, and precedent tends to show this is likely to continue.”  
  
Miles shrugged slightly. “Several tech companies have taken advantage of such loopholes to acquire Tinker Tech for study in an attempt to reverse engineer them, almost invariably without success, the Federal government reserves the right to do much the same as well although in recent years this has been quite rare since it so seldom produced results, and there are even a number of successful niche businesses that deal in custom Tinker products for various clients. Toybox is the most obvious one but there are several more that are less well known. The limited lifespan of Tinker hardware tends to be significantly more of an issue than the legality of acquiring it.”  
  
He looked down at the notebook he’d been scribbling in during the meeting. “Abandoned Tinker devices also sometimes turn up, especially in places like Brockton Bay, and while the PRT will usually either confiscate them or pay a bounty on them if turned in, they also tend to ignore quite a lot of the less important devices. At one point they obsessively collected every single item they could find, but in the last ten or twelve years this seems to have become low priority. Possibly due to lack of resources, but you’d have to ask them to find out for sure. A large amount of this sort of material ends up on online auction sites and again there’s precedent to show that, under many circumstances, it’s entirely legal. Laws of salvage among other things.”  
  
Secretary Robinson nodded slowly as he finished speaking. “So essentially you believe that the PRT do not have a monopoly on Tinker Technology, even if they would like to?”  
  
“That is what precedent and legal opinions show, sir, yes,” the other man agreed. “Additionally, I will point out that from what Doctor Hudson has explained, the result of the Prime Asset’s work, even it if was _inspired_ by Tinker work, _is not_ Tinker work. By definition. It’s entirely reproducible and understandable by a person of sufficient knowledge in the relevant fields, which makes it mundane technology and entirely out of the PRT’s legal remit no matter how they might attempt to argue the case. It’s _provably_ not the result of Parahuman powers. This has been shown before in the very limited number of cases where some technological breakthrough resulted from the study of previous Tinker devices, the archetypal case being of course _Solwind Industries vs Parahuman Response Team, 1997._ The PRT took that all the way to the Supreme Court and ultimately lost, on the basis that the innovation in question was explicable by normal science and therefore not Parahuman in nature regardless of the provenance of the original inspiration of the new solar cell design the company invented.”  
  
“I see,” Robinson replied after he’d mulled that over for a few seconds. “Excellent. So there is still no reason for the Chief Director to become involved.”  
  
Miles smiled thinly. “I suspect she would strenuously argue otherwise, but legally she would find it very, very hard to make her case. With the national security restrictions covering the entire situation being what they are, I would say it was impossible, to be honest. There is no legal rationalization I or anyone else can come up with that wouldn’t be dismissed out of hand with years if not decades of precedent to back that judgment up.”  
  
The Secretary thought this over again. Eventually he looked at one of the other people present. “I believe it would be a sensible idea to organize through suitable channels to acquire more Tinker Technology and see that it is passed on to the Prime Asset through DARPA. Discreetly, of course, no sense making the PRT get any more interested than they already are, but if this is what happens from the limited amount of samples locally sourced, it would be interesting to see what would happen with a larger quantity.”  
  
The dark haired man he was talking to, who was not known by name to any of the ones present other than the Secretary himself, nodded and made some notes. “That can be arranged,” he said in a quiet voice. “We have a number of potential sources for such things. It may cost.”  
  
Robinson waved a hand. “Money is irrelevant.”  
  
“Possibly other requirements will be needed.”  
  
“That can be arranged. Whatever it takes. As usual, this is the highest priority other than the safety of the Prime Asset and related personnel. Orders directly from the President.”  
  
“Understood, sir.” The man nodded again as he finished writing and slipped the notebook into his inside pocket. “And if any PRT operatives _do_ become involved?”  
  
“Dissuade them. Refer them to me if required. Ideally, though, keep things under their radar. It’ll make life a lot easier for everyone.”  
  
The agency man merely smiled a little.  
  
Looking around the table, Robinson seemed satisfied. “Thank you, everyone. Good work. We’ll meet again in two weeks unless something critical comes up. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to meet with the Joint Chiefs and brief them on the somewhat startling results our friend has yet again pulled out of a hat.”  
  
He stood up and picked up the folder, slipping it into his briefcase, while everyone else also rose and left. When he exited the room he headed deeper into the Pentagon, thinking hard about what would come next.  
  
 **=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=**  
  
Putting a forkful of spaghetti into her mouth, Taylor slowly ate it, while fiddling with her phone with her free hand. She discreetly nudged it to point at the table that the Wards sat at, all four boys current discussing baseball with some of their friends, while Vicky Dallon listened idly as she ate. The blonde girl looked mildly bored but not enough to push for a subject change.  
  
Tapping the screen a couple of times, she ran another scan, looking at the small complex graph that quickly built up in various colors and mentally decomposing the result to its component values. Yet again, the results were fascinating, and backed up some of the conclusions she’d arrived at over the last couple of weeks.  
  
She was getting closer to working out what the next step should be, and it looked like she was going to learn some really cool data when she built the equipment she’d need to take that step.  
  
Eating another mouthful, she picked the phone up as Amy sat opposite her, the other girl smiling at her. She smiled back, watching as her friend put her own tray down and grabbed a can of soda then popped the top. “That math test was a _bastard_ ,” Amy commented, looking somewhat annoyed.  
  
“It wasn’t that bad,” Taylor replied, toying with the phone then glancing at the screen before putting it in her pocket.  
  
“Yeah, _you_ would say that. You’re weird with math.” Amy grinned at her. Taylor laughed a little, shrugging.  
  
“I like it.”  
  
“Weird, I say.” Amy sighed, then picked up her fork. “I’ll stick to biology. _That_ I can handle.”  
  
“You’re good at Spanish too,” Taylor commented.  
  
“You’re picking _that_ up much too fast as well,” Amy grumbled good-naturedly. “I’ve been learning it for four years and I’m not as good as you are after a few months!”  
  
“Gift for languages, maybe?” Taylor suggested, smiling as she took a drink of her apple juice. “Linguistics is pretty neat.”  
  
“It’s unfair,” the other girl sighed. “You got the height and the brains. I’m just left with godlike power and snarkiness.”  
  
They exchanged a glance then burst out laughing, before discussing a movie both wanted to see. Taylor put her investigations to one side, as there was friendship to be done.  
  
And that was nearly as important as Science.


End file.
